Robert Silk
In this column two months ago, I wrote about the steps Panama
City Beach planned to take this month to curb the excesses of its college
spring break crowd as well as about the efforts of the city’s tourism board to
replace that party crowd with families.
Now, with spring break just about over, the verdict of those
efforts appears to be in: New laws that banned alcohol consumption during March
along the beach and set earlier last calls at local bars, combined with tight
enforcement, have sent the intended message.
By all reports, the parties in the Panhandle town were a mere
shadow this year of what they’ve been in earlier years. And while there was
still troubling news, including that of an Indiana college student who fell to
his death from a parking garage, crimes on the scale of last year’s alleged
public gang rape, or the house party where seven people suffered gunshot wounds,
appear to have been averted.
But cleaning up Panama City Beach has come with consequences.
Angry merchants are reporting large dips in revenue this month. In various
press accounts, business owners said they’re down 50%, 70% and even 90%.
“There were a lot more unintended consequences than anyone
imagined,” Jack Bishop, the owner of the waterfront bar Harpoon Harry’s told
the New York Times. “This tells you the power of the 24-hour news cycle and
social media.”
The impact of Panama City Beach’s spring break crackdown
illustrates a dilemma that many Florida beach towns are faced with. How do you
contain the party but keep the tourist dollars flowing?
And sometimes a destination’s strategy isn’t unified.
At a tourism conference I attended in Tampa in January, for
example, a representative of Emerald Coast Tourism, which promotes the
Destin/Fort Walton Beach/Okaloosa Island area, talked with some enthusiasm
about the spillover they expected to receive from the spring breakers
abandoning nearby Panama City Beach. But there was no such excitement from
local leaders, who during that same month set aside $100,000 to spend on spring
break security. The local sheriff’s office even prepared a letter expounding upon
his department’s zero-tolerance policy for “drunkenness and other offensive
behaviors” to be passed out to spring-breakers as they checked into area
hotels.
Asli Tasci, an assistant professor of hospitality and tourism at
the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management,
said that in particularly extreme cases, such as what Panama City Beach
experienced last year, safety and security will always trump financial
interests related to drawing spring-breakers and tourists in general. But she
said harsh measures such as bans and creating a strong, visible police presence
aren’t sustainable over the long term. She said that a proactive approach,
involving a coordinated effort from an area’s tourism board that involves all
stakeholders, is the best way to create pre-emptive strategies to head off
spring break excesses.
“When
residents are on the same boat with the CVB, they may have the willingness to
work as destination ambassadors infiltrating among visitors and monitoring for
potentially dangerous activities,” Tasci said in an email. “When businesses
understand the sociocultural dimensions of visitor activity besides the
financial benefits, they may also do their share of monitoring for potential
issues.”
In
the case of Visit Panama City Beach, officials hoped to buffer the anticipated
drop in college spring-breakers with the help of a $1 million ad campaign this
winter targeting families. Last week, David Demarest, the agency’s public
relations manager, told me they believe that the changeover to a more
family-friendly springtime destination will happen over time.
“A reason to have some
confidence in the future of the destination is that over the last five years
we’ve focused on increasing fall travel because we saw that as a growth
opportunity, and we’ve doubled the fall,” he said.