A district court in Hanover has decided that the traditional German poolside ritual — depositing a towel on a lounger at six in the morning, retreating for an unhurried breakfast, and reappearing some hours later — is, in fact, the travel agent's problem. A man on a €7,000 family package to Kos found every lounger taken before dawn. He sued TUI. He won €986.70.

This is, on its face, splendid news. The British have operated for four decades on two foundational stereotypes about Germans: that they are constitutionally superior at penalty shootouts, and constitutionally superior at the dawn towel-deployment phase of a Mediterranean holiday. The first has the merit of being statistically defensible. The second, regrettably for satirists, is not. A YouGov survey found Brits roughly twice as likely as Germans to admit to the practice — eleven percent against eight, with two-thirds of Germans actively disapproving. The stereotype, like most enduring stereotypes, mostly tells you about the people who hold it. The man-bites-dog quality of the case is therefore richer than it appears: a German is suing the German travel industry over a behavior the British perform at a higher rate, in pursuit of a stereotype that flatters the British by misattribution. The Hanover bench, on the available evidence, has sided with the dog.

Once you stop laughing, the case gets more interesting.

Travel used to arrive as a single product. The tour operator put together the flight, the hotel, the coach from the airport, and an implicit assurance that the result would be habitable. The package was, in effect, underwritten — one company stood behind one thing. That model has been quietly dismantled. Most of what now calls itself "travel" is a thin layer of search and bookings sitting on top of a thousand independent suppliers, each of them disclaiming liability for the others. The intermediary presents itself, when convenient, as a guarantor of quality, and disclaims, when inconvenient, any meaningful responsibility for what the suppliers actually do. The Hanover court has, perhaps inadvertently, ruled that you cannot have it both ways. If you sell the package, you own the loungers.

The strange thing is that TUI chose to fight this. The arithmetic is not obvious in their favor. Bad publicity has reached American breakfast television. A precedent now exists in the jurisdiction with the highest per-capita rate of holidaymakers in Europe. The next plaintiff will arrive over the buffet's tepid bacon, the lukewarm piña colada, or the unconscionable hue of the parasol. Settling for a four-figure sum and a non-disclosure agreement would have been, you would think, the cheaper outcome. That TUI chose litigation suggests either an unusually principled stand on the limits of intermediary liability, or a failure to do the math. I would not bet against the second.

A small consolation: the underwritten model never entirely disappeared. Travel Counsellors — Steve Byrne's outfit, friends of ours, and quietly one of the better-run companies in this category — has built an unusually loyal customer base by doing the unfashionable thing of standing behind what it sells. The firm is more expensive. People who use it tend to keep using it. The reason is not complicated: when something goes wrong, somebody picks up the phone, and the somebody is empowered to fix it.

The customer's appetite for a real experience has not gone anywhere. Only the willingness of intermediaries to underwrite it has. As people increasingly buy experiences rather than goods, the firms that quietly accept end-to-end responsibility will look less expensive, and rather more sensible, than they used to. The rest will have to make their peace with the towel.