Next week, many students will soak up the sun on beaches in hot spots like Florida, the Bahamas and Aruba — but many are also choosing to avoid the typical destination of Mexico this year.

According to Ann Arbor travel agents, the number of spring break travelers going to Mexico has decreased this year because of safety concerns due to the Mexican drug wars and because students are saving money for more culturally-enriching trips abroad or within the United States.

Rashmi Popat, manager of Boersma Travel in Nickels Arcade, said the number of students heading to Mexico is down this year, in part due to the current violence related to Mexican drug cartels.

According to The Guardian, as of mid-January there have been 283 deaths in the year 2010 due to the Mexican drug war. Several cartels have been fighting with one another for control of the drug routes into the United States over the last few years, but violence has escalated since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón ordered 6,500 troops to try to end the fighting.

“Mexico travel has gone down compared to Jamaica or Costa Rica or any other places that people would go to,” Popat said.

Despite the violence in the country, Popat said travelers returning from Mexico haven’t reported experiencing anything dangerous and that the hesitation to visit the country stems from word of mouth accounts.

“You hear this, you hear that and people just have this idea (that Mexico is unsafe) and people just view it that way,” Popat said.

LSA sophomore Jenna Marine said she is one of roughly 15 girls in Kappa Alpha Theta sorority who is not traveling to Acapulco, Mexico for spring break this year because her parents will not allow her to go due to safety concerns.

“Every year usually everyone from my sorority goes,” Marine said. “It’s very Greek. All the sororities and frats that we hang out with go, but this year, for the first time, not everybody’s going.”

But Marine said she understands why her parents won’t let her go on the trip.

“Their reasoning was that it’s unsafe and that they didn’t want to pay $2,000 for me to get drunk on an unsafe beach in Mexico,” Marine said. “I feel like I wouldn’t let my daughter go either.”

Joni Marine, Jenna’s mother, said it is the excessive drinking on spring break trips coupled with the dangerous drug activities in Mexico that worry her.

“I think it’s the concept of spring break that you’re going for one reason — and one reason only — and that is to get drunk 24/7,” Joni Marine said. “If you’re going to go for that reason, I really don’t like it to be in an unsafe place.”

LSA junior Hunter Rojas, whose family owns a hotel in Cozumel, Mexico, said despite students’ concerns the hotel hasn’t seen a decrease in tourists thus far.

“The government has been able to do a decent enough job of keeping the wars away from high tourism places,” Rojas said. “In these big hotels you don’t even leave them, so it’s not like you’re going to be mixing with scary locals.”

But results from a recent survey conducted by STA Travel — a travel agency with offices around the world, including in the Michigan Union — showed a major shift in this year’s most popular destinations for students traveling on spring break trips.

In the survey of 600 college students, 60 percent said they planned to travel during break. An unusually low 10 percent of college students said they were traveling to Mexico, while a surprisingly high 34 percent reported Europe as their planned destination.

In October 2008, STA conducted a similar survey asking students about their 2009 spring break plans.