The push to find a big new spring break crowd for Florida’s Panama City Beach isn’t yet working out as hoped.
Private promoters cancelled a scheduled series of Christian music concerts that locals hoped would bring spring business back to the Gulf Coast beach town after a crackdown shooed away lots of college spring breakers.
Organizers for RoadTrip Spring Break 2017 promised three weekends in March would create a “beach party for 18 to 25-year-olds, where Christians from coast-to-coast gather to redefine spring break.”
Ticket sales bombed, according to a woman who built convention space with the events in mind. The concerts were cancelled.
“Unfortunately, we put the words ‘spring break’ in our advertisements,” said Clair Pease, who owns a number of local businesses that rely on out-of-town visitors.
Parents probably nixed the idea after finding online accounts of past spring break troubles and crime, she said.
PCB (aka PC), a traditional playground for metro Atlanta, is searching for ways to financially rebuild one of its busiest periods of the year after it pretty much kicked out college spring breakers, one of the hardiest customer bases it ever had.
Still to be seen is whether that mood shift will curtail visiting high school students, who some PCBers contend caused some of the worst problems of past spring breaks. (Most metro Atlanta public schools go on break the first full week of April.)
