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Hot Spots Aggressively Vie for Student Dollars

By Michael Barbaro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page H01

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. -- Early last month, with midterm exams looming, University of Pittsburgh student Amy Devite confronted the semester's most daunting multiple-choice question: Spend spring break in Cancun, Mexico, or in Panama City Beach in Florida?

Cancun's drinking age is 18, and many of Devite's classmates, all underage, had lready booked reservations. But Devite picked the Florida panhandle over the Yucatan eninsula, shelling out $800 for a week of warm Coke and chilly water. "You hear the name everywhere on campus," said the 20-year-old. "Panama City this, Panama City that."

Indeed you do, and not just in Pittsburgh. This year, Panama City Beach stuffed brochures advertising itself as "the world's #1 spring break destination" inside 200 college newspapers. It stapled 20,000 glossy posters of beach babes on college billboards. It even set up a pulsating Web site reminding students, "It's never too early to start planning for spring break 2003."

With competition for spring-break dollars growing ever more fierce, American hot spots such as Panama City Beach are adopting aggressive direct-marketing tactics to win over the finicky college crowd. They have hired undergrads to peddle vacation packages inside student unions, snatched up advertising space on dormitory kiosks and invaded the airwaves on campus radio. And rather than relying on tour operators and travel agents to drum up interest, they're buying attention themselves. In 1999, Panama City Beach had no designated spring-break marketing budget; this year it will top $400,000.

Local tourism officials say they have no choice. The popularity of bargain travel packages to Mexico, Europe and the Caribbean, not to mention spring break community service and education programs, has caught them off guard. Warm weather, long beaches and cheap motels are no longer enough.

If it seems like a lot of work for just a few quick weeks of tourism, consider the size of the market. There are 15 million American college students. Together they will spend $6 billion this year on travel to a resort, according to market research firm Harrison Interactive. Here in Panama City Beach, which expects 450,000 college students during the next seven weeks, spring-break spending represents one-third of the economy, $270 million a year. "The choice was not difficult," Mayor Lee Sullivan said of the city's marketing campaign. "At this time of year, it was that business or no business."

Over in South Padre Island, Tex., they were making the same calculus. The Gulf of Mexico resort town plans to spend $100,000 on radio spots, posters and college newspaper advertisements, all to attract about 150,000 spring breakers.

Even Daytona Beach, Fla., whose love-hate relationship with spring breakers is tourism legend, is again selling itself to students, albeit tepidly. Daytona spent $62,000 marketing itself this year, with the local business community (which works through a spring break marketing committee) raising some $20,000 for various advertising. It bought local cable TV spots in many college towns, directing undergrads to its official spring break Web site. There, students are promised carefree driving on the beach -- at 10 mph -- and tips on finding local radio stations with "great tanning tunes."

Some Florida beach towns have sold themselves as spring break destinations for decades. But until now, they have largely competed against one another, not against the increasingly popular international hot spots. For under $600, for example, tour operators offer weeklong packages, including round-trip airfare and hotel expenses, to Cancun, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Acapulco and the Bahamas -- even Ireland. Loose drinking laws lure the underage, who are often sidelined at U.S. clubs. There are no reliable statistics about how many American college students venture outside U.S. borders for spring break, but many locations, like Cancun, attracted 100,000 in recent years (a number, travel agents say, Cancun officially low-balls).

On-campus marketing for spring break takes many forms, but the most popular is a wall-to-wall visual assault. Panama City Beach hired a (National College Marketing Company), to pepper colleges with its name. The company, which owns scrolling LED screens, newspaper stands and indoor billboards at 800 colleges, saturated campuses. The buzz had Devite, the University of Pittsburgh sophomore, and three classmates convinced that Panama City Beach would satisfy their simple agenda: "beach all day, clubs all night."

The annual mass migration is notoriously peripatetic, because the crowds can be fickle and the resorts can be ambivalent. The largest wave swept through Fort Lauderdale, Fla., (which yanked the welcome mat in the mid-1980s, citing rowdy, ribald partygoers) before flirting with Daytona Beach (which passed the torch in the early 1990s, citing overcrowding) and landing at Panama City Beach, where it has remained for the past decade. But the city knows that the same tour operators who turned this island into the epicenter of spring break can at any moment abandon them for another coastal city. After all, it was the tour companies that approached Panama City Beach about creating airfare-and-hotel packages when it became clear Daytona was growing restless.

"Once you become a has-been destination, it's hard to climb back," said Cody Khan, who manages five hotels along Panama City Beach's 27-mile stretch of sugary-white sand. Khan has developed two Web sites for his hotels -- one for spring breakers, the other (a somewhat sanitized version) for families. In the "tips" section of the hotel's spring-break site, there is a link called "how to avoid our friend Johnny Law," with advice on how to keep out of the Panama City Jail this spring break. One tip: "Many people don't realize that riding on the exterior of a vehicle is against the law."

Marketing executives can't believe it has taken some resorts this long to adopt the kind of elbows-out advertising tactics major corporations have employed for decades. "They are just now tying in to basic marketing 101."

Some resorts that get their share of spring breakers still refuse to spend a penny on direct marketing to college students. "They're pretty hard on the hotel rooms," said Bonnie Barsness, president of the Lake Havasu City, Ariz., tourism bureau. The city, which can attract up to 40,000 undergrads in March and April, shells out some $200,000 for year-round advertising -- to families.

For the most aggressive beach towns, the promotions don't stop on campus. Along Front Beach Road, a two-lane highway that straddles the Panama City Beach coast, sky-piercing billboards are part of the red-carpet strategy. Below the image of a buxom, red-haired woman, the owners of the Bikini Beach motel have spelled out "Welcome Spring Break 2003" in enormous red and black letters, noting in the line below: "ATM inside." Nearby, the Panama Cowboy Karaoke Bar and Grille urges students to "party here -- $1 shot specials."

Nightclubs hand out free admission tickets on the beach. Liquor stores offer discounted six-packs. And motels allow students to squeeze six and seven students into a room for four. At the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort, Khan has ordered blow-up mattresses for 300 rooms.

The conspicuous hospitality makes sense, business owners say. In Panama City Beach last year, spring breakers spent $25 million on hotel rooms and another $64 million in local stores and restaurants, according to the city's convention and visitors bureau. The money even trickles down to the city's ubiquitous tattoo parlors. Tracers, a tiny smoke-filled shop on Front Beach Road, doubles its staff during spring break as students seek out permanent memories of their fun in the sun. There are group discounts for the adventurous. "Most people get little ones their parents can't see," said Eric Gill, the store's 27-year-old body piercer.

University of Michigan student Courtney Klein, who discovered Panama City Beach through a school newspaper ad, marveled at the city's warm welcome to students who clog its streets and have been known to trash its hotels. After all, she said one night last week, on the prowl for beer near the Holiday Inn pool, "We didn't really come here for the food and ambiance."

The Washington Post Company
(Article Amended by NewAge Marketing, Inc. 3/13/03)

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