Good news for all those holidaymakers who have woken at dawn in an attempt to beat the Germans to the best-placed sun loungers: the act of securing the possession of any form of poolside or beach situated furniture by way of a strategically deployed towel is not legally binding.

The legal revelation will come as a blow for all those German tourists who believe that the draping of a towel is enough to secure possession. And it will hit them harder still to discover that it was one of their own countrymen who discovered it.

Tourists within rights to remove towels

"A British tourist would be quite within their legal rights to ignore the reservation implied by the towels if there is nobody there," said Cologne-based lawyer Ralf Höcker, the author of the New Dictionary of Popular Legal Errors -- the follow-up to the first volume which spent 20 weeks on the German bestseller list last year.

He did, however, advise a diplomatic approach to dealing with a towel covered chair and stressed that there were no grounds for removal if the lounger had been hired officially.

Höcker, who runs a law firm that represents celebrities including supermodel Heidi Klum, has spent the best part of 20 years trawling through obscure books on Spanish and German law in his research into rules which people believe to be legal but are in fact not.

"It's about all these German laws, like signs in shops that tell you to do things that just aren't legal," he told the British daily The Guardian. "People just don't realize how often they are bossed around when there is no justification."

Other dodgy reservation techniques

It was during this extensive research that Höcker discovered that leaving towels on loungers was not legally binding. At the same time he discovered that bar patrons who leave coats on chairs and pedestrians who try to claim parking spots for yet-to-appear cars are on equally shaky legal ground.

His revelation is likely to bring him hero status among the many tourists who have engaged in heated discussions with Germans over the towel issue but is unlikely to win him many friends in his own country.

"The towel thing is not such a big deal in Germany, but I have to say that the stereotype is true -- German people do reserve all the loungers. It's also worth saying that it also infuriates some German people," Höcker lamented. "There is a certain type of German tourist who does it, the same type who when they are on the beach builds a little wall with shelves and so on to protect their spot."

"I remember being on holiday in Germany when I was young. I wanted to sit down and the only seat was reserved with something. It's taken me 20 years to find out that this was illegal. Maybe that one event is what made me want to be a lawyer."