Spring-break travel packages appeal to college students

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND — Chad Hart’s eyes are half-lidded and bloodshot. They aren’t always that way, he explained with a voice hoarse from yelling.

He has been up late nights, making sure the spring-break events organized by his company, Inertia Tours, go off without a hitch.

“I’m out there with (the spring-breakers) every night for six weeks,” Hart said. “Its fun, but I won’t get any sleep until it’s over.”

Inertia Tours offers spring-break travel packages that range from a couple hundred dollars to well over $1,000, depending on the frills.

The company offer packages to several popular destinations, but South Padre Island is its bread and butter.

Inertia is like any other travel agency in that it organizes flights and hotel accommodations for clients. It’s different in that it offers meals and plans parties and side trips once they get to their destinations.

Those extras make Inertia popular with many spring-breakers, Hart said.

“People who haven’t been here don’t always want to figure out what’s good and what isn’t on their own,” he said. “That’s what we offer them.”

While Inertia and other tour operators take up only a small portion of the South Padre spring-break pie, they have established a strong foothold on the Island.

This year, Inertia has sold more than 3,000 tour packages, its highest ever, and has already begun booking for next year.

Boston-based StudentCity.com, which also does business as SpringBreakDiscounts.com, also offers South Padre spring-break packages. The company wouldn’t say how many of those packages it has sold this year, but it claims its business is up by as much as 30 percent.

“Each year, there are fewer spring-breakers heading to South Padre, and at the same time we keep growing,” Hart said.

According to the Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Island expects about 85,000 students for spring break this year. The estimate for 2007 is based on 2006 numbers.

Travel agents and tour companies took a significant hit to their businesses with the advent of travel search engines like Expedia and Travelocity.

Now, anybody with access to the Internet can bypass travel agents and book their travel reservations themselves.

“People can just go online and say, ‘I’ve got $500. What can you do for me?’” Hart said. “Once they realized they could do it for themselves, it didn’t take long for (travel agents’) business to drop off.”

Sara Nelly Burguete is the owner and operator of Olé Travel in Brownsville.

Travel agencies may never return to the halcyon days before the Internet, but they have found a niche market selling vacation packages, she said.

This year, Olé sold about 75 spring-break packages to Mexico and Europe, all of them to local students, Burguete said.

“It’s attractive to some people because you have your services included,” she said. “And they feel more secure knowing they have a travel agency backing them up.”

Stephanie Benson, a 22-year-old University of Buffalo student, was searching for spring-break packages online when she came across Inertia.

“I’d never bought a spring-break package before, but I found a decent deal (with Inertia),” Benson said. “I just thought it would be convenient to have everything included.”

Riki Przytuli, 21, and Lindsay Chess, 19, also found out about Inertia online. The students from the University of Iowa traveled with a group of friends to South Padre.

“They had a plan,” Chess said of the travel company. “There was something going on every night that we could count on.”

Hart still has a few more weeks of late nights to endure before he can get any rest himself — but he already has plans for when all the spring-break activity finishes.

“I’m going to Machu Picchu with my mom,” he said, referring to the ancient Incan city on a mountain northwest of Cuzco, Peru.

“We bought a tour package,” he added.