Spring break is a rite of passage for many college and university students and a trip many look forward to all year. Thousands flock to Florida each year in March and April because of the amazing weather, beaches, nightlife, and activities.

Panama City Beach, Florida

Starting in the late '90s, Panama City Beach began advertising the destination hoping to attract crowds that had formerly gone to Fort Lauderdale and then Daytona Beach before those communities enacted restrictions. From 2010 to 2016 an estimated 300,000 students traveled to the destination. The spawn of social media and digital marketing helped boost the beach town into a student mecca during March. Following well publicized shootings and a gang rape in 2015, several new ordinances were put into effect prohibiting drinking on the beach and establishing a bar closing time of 2 am. Central Time. Reports showed a drop in Panama City Beach's spring break turnout in March 2016 followed by increased family tourism in April 2016. Both are attributed to the new ordinances by the Bay County Community Development Corporation (CDC).

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Fort Lauderdale's reputation as a spring break destination for college students started when the Colgate University men's swim team arrived to practice there over Christmas break in 1934. Attracting approximately 20,000 college students in the 1950s, spring break was still known as 'Spring vacation' and was a relatively low-key affair. This began to change when Glendon Swarthout's novel, Where the Boys Are was published in 1960, effectively ushering in modern spring break. Swarthout's 1960 novel was quickly made into a movie of the same title later that year, Where the Boys Are, in which college girls met boys while on spring break there. The number of visiting college students immediately jumped to over 50,000. By the early 1980s, Ft. Lauderdale was attracting between 250,000 and 350,000 college students per year during spring break. Residents of the Fort Lauderdale area became so upset at the damage done by college students that the local government passed laws restricting parties in 1985. At the same time, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was enacted in the United States, requiring that Florida raise the minimum drinking age from 18 to 21 and inspiring many underage college vacationers to travel to other competing locations in the United States for spring break. By 1989, the number of college students traveling to Fort Lauderdale fell to 20,000, a far cry from the 350,000 who went four years prior.

Daytona Beach, Florida

Meanwhile, the spring break scene and its lusty young demographic was getting noticed. In 1986, MTV launched its first spring break special from Daytona Beach, Fla., a program which has continued from varying locales ever since. The images it broadcast only reinforced spring break's reputation for alcoholic and sexual excess. The American Medical Association began warning of the dangers of binge-drinking and risky sexual behavior; fingers have also been wagged at young women for prebreak "anorexic challenges" and documented promiscuity. Many universities have taken to distributing "safe break bags" to students — including sunscreen, condoms, and a sexual-assault manual. Such shenanigans also became the métier of spring break's most controversial enthusiast: Joe Francis, the man behind the Girls Gone Wild video series. Francis' videos of topless coeds made him fortune — quite literally off the backs (and especially fronts) of young women — until an ill-advised shoot in Panama City, Fla., in 2003 earned him an eleven-month prison sentence for videotaping underage girls.