Wealth managers and spring break revelers will mingle this month during the heat of the Spring Break 2025 in the heart of South Beach .
One group will feel South Florida’s hospitality. The other won’t.
"We’ve broken up with our biker boyfriend or girlfriend and moving forward with the new one in a linen suit," said Miami Beach Commissioner Joe Magazine a year ago when the city's finance committee recommended issuing a special events permit to a financial advisor conference.
FutureProof Citywide is expected to bring at least 3,000 finance professionals to the beach next to Lummus Park in mid-March. It's the first time conference organizers have brought the event to South Florida. It has held a similar event in Huntington Beach, Calif. since 2022.
The conference represents the city's efforts to turn away the traditional young adult spring break crowds in favor of other — less rowdy and likely higher spending — visitors.
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Jonathon Plutzik was one of the Miami Beach business owners who helped bring the FutureProof event to the beach. In his case, it will be right outside his hotel, the Betsy on Ocean Drive. He called the event " a very serious undertaking right in the middle of historic spring break."
Plutzik is the chairman of the Ocean Drive Association, which wrote a letter in support of the financial conference. "This is needed especially for the month of March which has been such a challenging period for our community," the 2024 letter to the city commission read.
March is one of the two top months for the South Florida hospitality industry. Hotel occupancy is up. Restaurants tend to be busy. And tourist tax collections jump. Tourists crowd the sand and young adults have poured into Miami Beach.
But the city has been explicitly trying to become less friendly to traditional spring breakers after three years of violence, including fatal shootings and large street crowds. Last year, Miami Beach produced a slick social media video saying that it was "breaking up" with spring break. This year, it spent $425,000 to make a fake reality TV video of a spring break ruined by the city's rules.
The city thinks its efforts are working. It notes hotel occupancy was up last year as it staged its “break up with spring break” campaign. It believes the effort worked to reduce violence that the city experienced in previous years.
There have been critics who say tactics to change Miami Beach’s spring break audience like $100 parking fees, security checkpoints, and a show of force by police are efforts to discourage Black tourists. The city says its seasonal rules are not racially motivated.
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"A lot of negative advertising is definitely frightening people away," said Lloyd Mandell. This will be his 47th spring break as a South Beach hotel owner. He owns and runs the boutique Suites of Dorchester and the Marseilles Hotel.
His business in March is "significantly off" compared to previous years. "I can only guess at this point of a 15% to 20% drop in revenue, which is pretty significant considering that our costs are rising significantly," he told WLRN.
Mandell said he has fewer guests and they are paying less for this time of year. Many of his regular guests are leisure travelers from Europe and Canada, not the usual spring break crowd.
" There is a lot of competition. There's a lot of very fine destinations throughout the world," Mandell said. "The word apparently is not getting out to counteract the effects of our elimination of what we call spring break."
March and April are the two big months for hotels, bars and restaurants in Miami Beach. Almost 25 cents of every $1 collected in tourist taxes throughout the entire year are collected in those two months.
After a sharp three - year rebound from the COVID-19 induced recession in 2020, resort taxes collected by Miami Beach in March fell slightly last year compared to the same month in 2023.
"We're looking actually at a very strong month," said Plutzik at The Betsy. "We actually like to refer to it as spring vacation, because March really is the best month of the year."
He and others hope the FutureProof event helps prove that Miami Beach's rowdy and lawless spring break days are over.
FutureProof CEO Matt Middleton called spring break "a kind of a stain for this month" a year ago when he went before the city commission Finance Committee. The commission wound up unanimously endorsing the event. Full price tickets run from about $1,000 to almost $4,000 for the four-day conference that features speakers on stages on the South Beach sand. It includes one-hour concerts by rock bands The Fray and All American Rejects at the end of its last full-day.
"We declared to the world what we do not want to be for spring break, and what we do not want to be as a city," said Commissioner Magazine last spring as he supported bringing the wealth management event to the beach in hopes of changing the future spring break visitors. "And now it's time to say what we do want to be and what fills that void."
This spring break will be the latest test of those efforts.
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