Hotel that refused homeless guests has change of heart
WILMINGTON, Del. — After a swank hotel downtown refused to allow some homeless people to stay at the inn on Christmas night — even when a couple hoping to help the less fortunate paid for the room — it says has reversed course, and another high-end hotel here says it, too, will provide free lodging to the homeless.
The Christmas night plan began with Deb Bennett and Matthew Scott Senge of Newark, Del., who founded the Road to Redemption Ministries here. They wanted to do something special for a particular group of homeless people.
"I used to be one of them," Bennett said, adding that she lived with them under a bridge for awhile after her house burned down in 2012.
Initially, she thought of booking rooms at a hotel just south of the city. But Senge, who has served time in prison for theft by deception and passing bogus checks before he said Bennett helped him turn his life around, suggested they splurge on the Hotel du Pont, where he explained their plan and reserved a room at the nightly rate of $639.
The couple then visited the homeless people — including a Bennett family member — and told them about the hotel room, she said.
"They were blown away," Bennett said. "One woman, she cried."
Three hours before check-in, as the couple was assembling gift baskets and food for the intended guests, a Hotel du Pont representative called Senge and canceled the reservation.
"People who have their nice cars and 8-to-5 jobs and houses to go home to, they don't understand," Bennett said. "They don't realize that, at any given moment, they could become one of 'those people.' I know, because I did."
Du Pont representative Brendan McEvoy said the reservation was declined under standard hospitality operating practice of requiring photo identification at check-in. When making the reservation, Senge had told management that the homeless people they intended to house at the hotel did not have IDs.
"Our primary concern is for the safety of all of our guests," he said.
If they do have ID — as Senge said Thursday they do — "they would be welcome," McEvoy said.
Meanwhile, news of the DuPont refusal prompted Brad A. Wenger, general manager of the Hilton Wilmington Christiana, to offer 10 free rooms Thursday night for homeless people. Discounted rates for Friday night at the du Pont start at $179 a night for a room with one king-sized bed, $71 at the Hilton.
Wenger was in contact Thursday afternoon with Code Purple shelter coordinators to make the arrangements, including an offer to pick up the guests with a hotel van.
Bennett called Wenger's offer beautiful.
She said negative publicity from an initial WDEL-AM, Wilmington story and subsequent outrage on social media may have motivated the Hotel du Pont's change of heart.
"I have real mixed feelings about it," she said Thursday night.
But she said she was glad that the people she and her husband had planned to surprise with Christmas night at the hotel instead will be staying there Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.
"We have invited Mr. Senge's guests to the hotel, as early as this weekend," Lisa Bolten, director of DuPont Hospitality, said in a statement released Thursday evening. "If the guests do not have IDs, we will work with them to address that."