Most if not all of these people are over 18, no? Make them pay for their own destruction.
This.
And as a native Floridian I’m absolutely okay with banning spring-breakers from coming here.
It’s gonna go this way.
Because focusing on the underage drinking is a good way to weed out some of the spring breakers. And Florida won’t want to ban spring breakers, just the ones who cram 10 kids into a single hotel room and who trash the place or get themselves killed in drunken hotel balcony accidents.
But much of the Caribbean and Central America are cheap and the drinking age is 18. I live in one of the major college towns and I’ve noticed that Florida college students go to Cancun. (I love spring break because my town clears out and traffic is WONDERFUL for one short week.) There will also be some small fraction of spring breakers who maybe go in together on a vacation rental and keep to themselves and drink/party responsibly and don’t cause much trouble. We all want those spring breakers. And the Midwestern kids and Canadians maybe can pool money and drive, but not all will be able to afford plane tickets to Cancun. But also those kids think South Carolina is warm in March (and it is if you’re from Michigan and just left a foot of snow on the ground back home), so other parts of the East Coast probably also see more spring break action as PCB cracks down on the nuisance aspects.
All they have to do is enforce existing laws. No drinking in public, disturbing the peace, nudity, public urination, intoxication, property damage…
bring in police from outside jurisdictions and split the ticket bounty with them.
I know hotels already have age restrictions, but they are private businesses and can do that if they so choose. For a government entity to tell them they have to is over the line.
By the time I was 24 I had a college degree, was a Sheriffs deputy, was married with a child, and owned my own home. Don’t know if anyone did it back in those days, but I would have been irate if I couldn’t get a room because I wasn’t 25 yet!
Fort Lauderdale banned it years ago.
(Where it all began)
And I know this how?
Born and raised in Lauderdale.
My family and I were in the crowd scene in “Where The Boy’s Are”.
Internationally one can’t rent a car until 25 years of age. I see no difference.
Just the heavy alcohol and wild club scene. Spring Break is still very much a thing here - the beaches are way more crowded, and the bars along the way get a lot busier that time of year. My regular bar is a block off the beach and it’s pretty easy to tell when Spring Break is happening.
But yeah…it’s very different than the old days.
Atlanta had Freaknik for a while. Started in small but really took off in the 90s. The urban version of Florida spring break.
It quickly grew to a nightmarish mess of traffic and other problems.
Atlanta clamped down. Stopped the cruising and congregating. Hit hard on public drinking, etc.
And suddenly it went away.
It can be done, but Atlanta had an edge in not having a lot of tourist stuff that interests young people. E.g., no beaches. Also business didn’t want it. The big hotels want convention traffic, not college kids crammed 20 to a room.
The difference is that the rental car company, presumably, established the minimum age; it’s not imposed upon them by the government.
To answer pkbite’s comment, many hoteliers already impose minimum age restrictions. I don’t think this would be something written in the code.