Groups, Reunions and Retreats on Chincoteague Island

The Refuge Inn is a 72-room hotel on Chincoteague Island, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, owned by the same family since 1973. We put your group’s rooms near each other, deliver breakfast to every door in the morning, and hand you the key to a meeting room with a full kitchen and a screened porch. Some of our groups have been coming so long that when they check out, we just say, “Same time next year?”

We have been holding our own gatherings here since the hotel was built — staff meetings, community meetings, family reunions, birthday parties, and more than a few weddings. Over the years we have gained first-hand knowledge of what it takes to host a successful group or event. Your group benefits from those decades of experience — and from the time we learned the hard way that two serving spoons is simply insufficient for a thirty-person potluck barbecue.

The meeting room is what makes a reunion work — a place to eat together, a kitchen for whoever has always done the cooking, and a screened porch for people who want to enjoy the fresh air. Birthdays and anniversaries land here for the same reason. If the reunion brings children, our families page covers what there is for them to do.

Retreat groups take the room for a weekend and let the island do the rest. It is quiet out of season, and there are plenty of places to witness the wonders of creation — the refuge gate is a quarter mile from the front door.

Teams come out for planning sessions and training weeks. The room takes thirty around tables or forty in chairs, with the television, the projector screen and the wifi for the working part of the day, and direct billing so nobody goes home to file an expense report. We honor the Chincoteague Island per diem rate for federal, state and contract workers.

We take school groups. Green Acres School brings its seventh graders every spring for a two-day outdoor-focused field trip that is the highlight of their year.

We also host the RockOn and RockSat student launch programs, which fly student-built experiments out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility just off the island. They have been based here for decades, and come for a week twice each summer to finalize their builds and launch their rocket. While they are here the meeting room becomes a rocket science laboratory, and we love celebrating with the student teams after a successful launch and project recovery.

The Virginia Society of Ornithology has come every September since we opened in 1973, and their Friday afternoon Meet-and-Greet on the back lawn has become part of the trip. New Jersey Audubon comes in November. Both are quiet months on the island and busy ones for migrating birds on the refuge, which is the whole point. We keep a month-by-month birding guide and a record of every species heard on the property.

Hunting parties and fishing groups book the same way. More is on the fishing and hunting page.

We host casual wedding receptions of thirty or fewer — a small, DIY venue, not a full-service ballroom. The kitchen and the screened porch do most of the work — a caterer sets up in one and the party spills onto the other — and the wedding party can take a block of rooms, so nobody is driving anywhere afterward.

Workshop leaders book here too. A plein air painting workshop runs out on the lawn and the marsh, with the meeting room for the indoor sessions and the meals. If you run a class or a workshop and need somewhere a group can spread out for a few days, we will hold the rooms and the meeting room together.

We have the most room midweek and in the shoulder seasons. Spring and fall midweeks are the easiest dates to hold a block on, and they are the best weather we get. We have written up a spring midweek, a fall one, and forty-eight hours in October if your group only has a weekend.

Call the front desk with two or three possible dates and we will tell you which one leaves your group the most room.