Spring Break, which is the collective term for the period in March or April during which universities across North America take their weeklong pause, bring very large numbers of young people to beach destinations such as Miami Beach, Daytona Beach and Panama City in the U.S. and Cancun, Cabo San Lucas and Punta Cana internationally.
Numbers from the TSA showed that 47.7 million people, or approximately one in every seven Americans, passed through its security checkpoints during Spring Break season in 2024 — a 6% increase from the previous year.
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A row of hotels is seen on Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, Fla. The city is encouraging spring breakers to behave responsibly as they visit during March 2025.
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Miami Beach to partiers: ‘The show is fake but the rules are very real’
Miami Beach, a separate municipality located on the barrier island between the larger Miami area to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, has in recent years seen a spike in bad behavior from Spring Break arrivals coming in from across the country to party.
For the second year in a row, Miami Beach is putting out an ad campaign reminding spring breakers to stay in line and watch their drinking.
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The one minute and 30-second video put out by the City of Miami Beach on various social media platforms mimics the style of many reality shows filmed in seaside resorts in which actors arriving to the city describe how they are going to “have their best Spring Break ever” and start dramatically complaining about rules like the midnight curfew on certain nights and police checks for public intoxication and drunk driving.
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Drunk driving, shootings and tramplings: What Miami Beach is up against this Spring Break
“The show is fake but the rules — $100 parking, curfews, heavy police presence, security checkpoints, DUI enforcements — are very real,” the PSA concludes.
The ad campaign first came into being in 2024 after what, according to numbers that Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Fernandez provided to NPR in 2024, was an observed spike in crime during the Spring Break period in particular — 33 shootings between 2014 and 2024, as well as 16 incidents in which someone was stampeded to death in a crowd during the same time period.
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The memo issued by the City of Miami Beach said that the “marketing campaign [is] aimed at notifying potential spring breakers that Miami Beach is not interested in being a party destination and will not tolerate disorderly behavior.”
While a curfew has not yet been announced, Miami Beach has traditionally set them for specific weekends in which partier numbers were predicted to surpass normal levels. Those dates are, for the upcoming Spring Break, predicted to be the weekends of March 13 to 16 and March 20 to 23.
After receiving multiple complaints from local business owners in advance of the season, Miami Beach officials sent out a memo saying that a state of emergency and curfew were among the options resorted to the city “based on on-the-ground observations of conditions during and leading up to Spring Break as well as historical data and trends.”
Miami Beach officials also said that, after stricter regulations were implemented last year, Spring Break arrests went down by more than 8% compared to 2023.
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