SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

Six years after graduating from the University of Florida, Jorge Brouwer and Todd Steinberg still celebrate spring break. Now, though, they earn their livings doing so, taking college students to the Bahamas and Acapulco, Mexico, to slam back cocktails at beach parties, on booze cruises and in all-you-can-drink dance clubs.

It's not that these two 28-year-olds are stuck in some kind of frat-boy time warp. But as owners of the Wilton Manors-based Xtreme Trips (Xtremetrips.com), they have figured out how to turn their love of partying into a business. This past spring break, the company took 1,500 students on vacation, up from 800 in 2004.

Brouwer has been in the travel business since 2002, when he formed Xtreme Xperiences, which carted busloads of high-school students to Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights and Wet 'n Wild water park in Orlando. He later added Bahamas cruises for graduating high-school seniors before moving the home-based business to Wilton Plaza in Wilton Manors.

As Brouwer's high-school clients began graduating, they came to him inquiring about college trips. "They're like, 'What have you got for spring break?' " he recalls. "I didn't have anything, so I had to create something. So I did this really cool Bahamas trip for a couple of hundred people in 2003."

Shortly afterward, Brouwer was in a Publix parking lot and encountered Steinberg, whom he'd met years earlier at a UF fraternity party and with whom he'd spent a few spring breaks. "We were both, like, 135 pounds, little skinny freshmen," Brouwer remembers.

Months after rekindling their friendship, Brouwer and Steinberg established Xtreme Trips, which is now promoting winter snowboarding and skiing packages as well as 2007 treks to Acapulco and the Bahamas. Brouwer attributes the company's continued growth to word of mouth and return travelers such as Mollie Rose of Boca Raton.

When Rose, a University of Miami journalism major, wanted to participate in the 2005 Acapulco trip, she tried to earn a free ride as an Xtreme Trips rep. Because she only sold five of the required 15 trips, her parents ended up paying for her vacation. But earlier this year, she returned to Acapulco after earning a free trip as the company's UM campus manager. She's planning to go to Acapulco again next year.

"It's beautiful," she says. "There are all these different hotels where all the spring breakers stay, and there are bars in the middle of all the pools. It's a crazy party scene."

The Xtreme party package includes VIP treatment at clubs with two-hour lines, Rose says. "You don't have to wait for anything, which is awesome," she explains, "because going to school in Miami, we go to South Beach all the time. I'm actually a club promoter in South Beach, so my friends aren't used to waiting in line or paying for anything."

Veronica Yestrumskas, a University of Miami senior, took the same Acapulco trip this past March and plans to return next spring. "It was really fun," she raves, "one of the best weeks of my life probably."

Yestrumskas says she enjoyed having everything from the Hyatt reservations to her airport transportation prearranged. "I don't think I saved any money by doing it through Xtreme Trips," she says. "It was more of a convenience factor because everything was taken care of for us."

Since Xtreme's staff can't monitor their clients 24-7, they provide emergency wristbands with three cell phone numbers. They are available to help in any way, from telling a client how to use a calling card to taking a traveler to the hospital. Brouwer did just that in the Bahamas last spring when an 18-year-old got mugged while walking back to his hotel room and needed stitches.

A big draw of Xtreme Trips' destinations is that the drinking age is lower than that in the United States. Even though many clients are drinking legally for the first time on these trips, Brouwer reports surprisingly little trouble. "When we first started, we were really scared about what the kids were going to do, how they would act, how they would treat their hotel rooms," he says. "But they're generally pretty good."