The last day of a package holiday in Tenerife has a shape nobody warns you about. Your room goes at ten, or eleven if the hotel is relaxed about it, and the flight home is somewhere near midnight because that's how the UK flights out of the south tend to work. That leaves you eight hours, often more, and you get them while holding a suitcase.
I've come round to treating it as a bonus day. It can be a perfectly decent one, as long as the bags get sorted early.
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Bags first, everything else after
Everything about checkout day depends on what happens to your luggage in the first hour. Hotels in Los Cristianos and Playa de las Américas will often hold bags for departing guests, which is fine if you're staying in the same resort all day. The catch is that you then have to come back to collect, and a hotel lobby at seven in the evening is a poor place to be standing around with nothing to do. Ask at reception the night before. Some will say yes happily, others will point you at a corridor behind the desk. A few don't do it at all.
The other route is paying for storage. You can book luggage storage in Tenerife through local shops and hotels, with some self-service lockers as well, and it usually runs to a few euros a bag for the day. Plenty of the options are near bus stations, which is the part that matters if you plan to move around the island during your last hours. Sort it before you check out, not after, when you're already outside in the sun with a case and a decision to make.
Back to the beach
Then you go back to the beach, because that is the entire point of the bonus day.
Most of the beaches in the south are black volcanic sand. It looks wrong for about two days and then it just looks like the beach. It does hold heat in a way pale sand does not, so keep something on your feet between the towel and the water, especially in the middle of the afternoon.
The front row of sunbeds is covered in towels before nine in the morning, put there by people who are at that exact moment sitting down to breakfast, and this has been true of every package resort I have ever stayed in. The sea is the same temperature from the fourth row back, so on a last day, when you're only there for a few hours, the towel game stops mattering.
You do start noticing the other people who checked out at ten. The tell is a rucksack that is slightly too large for a beach, worn at two in the afternoon by somebody who has clearly been sunburnt for six days already.
Showers on the main resort beaches will get the salt off you. Bring a small towel in your day bag and something dry to change into, because you'll be sitting in an airport later on and you don't want to be damp for it.
On a clear day you can see Teide in the middle of the island from a lot of the south coast. Late afternoon is the better time to look at it.
A long lunch
The useful thing about checkout day is that lunch can run as long as you want it to. There is no afternoon plan to get back for and no dinner booked at the hotel. So eat properly and stay put for two hours. Charge your phone if there is somewhere to plug in, because you are going to be looking at it a great deal later on.
Shade and some sight of the water are all you need from the place.
North, if you have the appetite for it
If eight hours in the same resort sounds bleak, the north is the alternative, with the honest caveat that the journey from the southern resorts up to Santa Cruz takes a while, and that you'll spend a decent chunk of your bonus day sitting in a seat. TITSA runs the island's green buses, and the 111 links the southern resorts with Santa Cruz along the motorway in about an hour, leaving from the Costa Adeje and Los Cristianos bus stations.
Santa Cruz is the capital and a working city rather than a resort, and it's a change of scene if you've had a week of the same promenade. La Laguna is just inland from it, and the old town there is UNESCO listed, all straight streets and painted facades. An hour or two on foot covers it.
North of Santa Cruz, past the village of San Andrés, is Playa de las Teresitas, which is golden because the sand was brought in from elsewhere. That's no secret and nobody minds. If you want your last beach hours on golden sand, that is where they are.
The bit to be careful about is the return leg. You have to get back to wherever the bags are, then out to the airport, and you're doing all of that in the evening when you're tired and slightly sunstruck. I would build in far more slack than feels necessary, and check the times before you commit to the trip north.
Then it's Tenerife South and the night flight home and landing in the UK at some hour that barely counts as a time. That part is the same however you spend the day, so you may as well have spent it in the sea.