Ah, Spring Break. A week filled with beach trips with friends and family, romantic outings with your significant other, parties and also hotels trying to ruin a college kid’s fun. 
During the last few months, I have been planning my spring break vacation with a few friends of mine. I am from Florida, a state filled with numerous beaches, which made me want to go home during the week-long break to get some sun. 
Throughout the two-to-three-month process of planning my spring break, I have come to find that many hotel rooms require guests to be 21 years of age and older to make a reservation to stay in their hotels in Florida. And if you are younger than 21 years of age, you must have a parent or guardian staying in the room with you, which is a total buzzkill for any college student. I mean, who would want to take their parents on spring break with them? Nobody.
From a hotel’s perspective, I can understand not wanting to have rambunctious college students disturbing the peace, destroying their property or getting wasted to the point that they don’t know how to use their room key. 
As reported by Insider during the summer of 2021, many carefree college students were bar hopping during a “record high of more than 21,000 new COVID cases” within a day on July 30th. This situation obviously warranted concern considering that according to John Hopkins University there have been a little over a million COVID-related deaths throughout the United States. Also, with the demand that there was on physicians, nurses and more, the college students in this scenario should have been more careful. 
However, one thing that I will never understand is that I can join the military, learn how to operate various pieces of weaponry, sacrifice my life for my country, yet I cannot book a hotel room. Do these hotels not understand how utterly ridiculous that sounds? 
There are many things wrong with that picture. Essentially, I can go to another country, fight for others and potentially get killed in action but I’m not mature enough to spend my spring break in a hotel reserved by my 18-year-old self. 
Outside of having the option to devote my life to my country, 18-year-olds also have the ability to register and become a voter for upcoming elections within their state and country. One of the greatest gifts that voters have is to get their voice out there and potentially help make life-changing decisions for their fellow citizens and themselves.
According to CNBC, during the 2020 presidential election, approximately 65% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted. If that 65% is completely accurate during this election, many more young people voted than in the prior elections, choosing who will run the country for the next four years, yet many in this age group cannot rent hotel rooms.  
I do not know how anyone between the ages of 18 and 20 could think that they are truly adults when hotel rooms treat them like immature children. The only thing I have to ask these hotels is: Am I an adult or a reckless child?
Taylor Hamilton is an 18-year-old mass communication freshman from Tallahassee, Florida.