Tips for Avoiding the Young and the Restless

Despite my efforts to pretend my family had the beach to ourselves, the burst of laughter from the group a few blankets away from us was impossible to ignore. The high school-aged boys had sculpted a naked woman in the sand. They seemed gratified by the shrieks their work elicited from their female traveling companions.

As the scene unfolded, I looked over at my 13-year old daughter and hoped that she wouldn’t be part of a similar tableau in a few years.

When I booked our stay in Puerto Vallarta, I didn’t think student travelers would be an issue. Our trip was in late June –a good three months after college spring break season and only weeks after the CDC lifted its health alert for Mexico.

High School Tour Group. But we realized that graduation season is a time when some high school tour groups visit Mexico.

While the student group that stayed at our hotel didn’t cause any major disturbances, it really wasn’t the crowd I wanted to spend time with on my vacation. It was clear that no one’s mother or father was around. Just a “big brother” figure that ran the tour operation.

I was a “spring breaker” too once, so I have nothing against having a little fun. I’d just prefer to be somewhere else.

Here are a few tips for avoiding the young and the restless:

• Study up. Check out the web sites of some of the largest student-tour operators. These include Grad City, StudentCity.com, and STS (Student Travel Services). You can see that their already offering deals for the 2010 spring break season. They all have certain things in common that will give you an idea of what to look out for.
• Know Where to Avoid. Each one of the major student tour operations offer trips to the following destinations in Mexico: Acapulco, Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlan.
• Stay Away from All-Inclusives. The tour operators give students several all-inclusive luxury hotels to choose from. Be particularly wary of inexpensive all-inclusive luxury hotels in any of the locations mentioned above. The general idea is to have the students spend all day drinking at the hotel’s pool and all night partying at the clubs. A cute bed-and-breakfast is the absolute antithesis of this scene.
• Stay a Few Hours from the Airport. Once their charges land at the airport, student tour operators whisk them away to a nearby hotel. It seems unlikely that they would book a hotel that was a couple hours from the airport.
• Go Off the Beaten Path. There are plenty of wonderful places in Mexico that are not on the student tour operators’ iteneraries. For example, none of the ones I looked at offered trips to Oaxaca even though it has some of Mexico’s most beautiful beaches.
• Vacation in the City. The abundant cultural sights in Mexico City and Guadalajara are entirely off the student tour operators’ radar screens.

What are your tips for avoiding the young and the restless?

Photo by eralon (Via Creative Commons)