Just what you want on a Caribbean vacation. A couple of nice chairs on a terrific beach, an umbrella for some shade, nice bright sun, and a little table to put your drinks on. Nice and private, no other people around except occasional visits from your butler, and not a care in the world.

But that’s not what you always get. There’s usually limited beach area, limited number of chairs, and you end up in a place with too much sun or not enough. It can’t be helped. The resorts are usually full and they try to do the best they can.

What a lot of resorts look like is this:

Not what you expected or wanted, but sometimes it’s the only way to have enough chairs on the beach for all the guests. But there are enough chairs for everyone. No one is lying in the sand without a chair. But it seems everyone wants the same chairs. They want the front row for a view of the ocean or a specific place around a particular pool.

A few of the things that doesn’t help the situation are:

– People that reserve more than one chair per person. Maybe they want to sit in one area in the morning and another area in the afternoon. So they get up early and put stuff on both sets.

– Or people that have something else to do one day, like go on an excursion, and they don’t tell their butler to not reserve chairs for them that day. So prime spot chairs go wasted that no one else gets to use that day.

– People that get chairs, but never use them. They spend all day in the pool at the swim-up bar. They only use the chairs they reserved to park their stuff on. There should be a better place to store your stuff if you’re not actually going to use the chairs to sit on. 

Then there are the people that don’t think that butlers should be able to reserve chairs. They say that they paid to be there and people with butlers shouldn’t have an advantage for chairs. But these people could get a butler room and get that same benefit. Butler rooms typically cost more and that is one of the perks of having a butler.

We normally have a butler, and they normally reserve chairs for us. One resort, not to be named here, doesn’t allow butlers to do that. So I was getting up during the night to go down to the beach and put towels on the chairs we wanted for the day. One morning at about 4am, I went down and there were already towels on the chairs we had been using. Rather that take the other peoples’ stuff off and start a feud, I simply picked a different pair. Apparently the people that took “ours”, didn’t really like them because the following day they were elsewhere and I was able to get ours back. The whole thing is a bit of a pain in the butt.

In an ideal world, we’d all get the chairs in the picture at the top of this blog. But it’s not an ideal world and we have to make do. So please be respectful of others, take a deep breath, and count to 10 before you do anything rash that you may regret later. Remember, it’s just a chair.