The Wilmington area offers meeting planners more than 4,000 rooms plus meeting facilities that range from intimate country getaways to large world-class conference centers accommodating 1,000 people in a single room. The area's largest event and convention venue is the Bank One Center on the Riverfront, which offers more than 60,000 square feet of exhibit and meeting space, including an additional 45,000 square feet new in 2005. Convenient to major airports, hotels, I-95, and Amtrak, the center has boardrooms, meeting rooms, ballrooms, state-of-the-art audio-visual, and more than 2,400 parking spaces.
New Castle County convention bureau officials boast of more than 40 hotels that specialize in medium-size and small conferences and meetings plus 400 restaurants—all set in the beautiful Brandywine Valley with its vistas made famous by three generations of Wyeths. One of the larger venues is Clayton Hall Conference Center at the University of Delaware, which offers state-of-the-art amenities accommodating intimate gatherings to 1,500-person conclaves. The Chadds Ford Ramada Inn & Conference Center in nearby Glenn Mills, Pennsylvania, offers almost 15,000 square feet made up of 13 well-lit meeting/banquet rooms, including a state-of-the-art auditorium with built-in AV and seating for up to 200 people. The Hotel du Pont is a historic property that includes 30 meeting rooms, five in the self-contained Executive Conference Center, and 11 rooms in a state-of-the-art High Tech Conference Center. Also located within the Hotel du Pont is the multipurpose 1,200-seat Du Pont Theater, available for meetings. Both the Embassy Suites Hotel and the Radisson Hotel and Suites Wilmington offer meeting space in the Greater Wilmington Area. Unique meeting sites in Wilmington include the Delaware Art Museum, Delaware Museum of Natural History, and The Grand Opera House.
Convention Information: Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau, 100 West 10th Street, Suite 20, Wilmington, DE 19801; telephone (302)652-4088; fax (302)652-4726