She was Queenstown's queen of hospitality in her heyday, running the former Beach House from the late 1930s and then the iconic O'Connell's Hotel from the 1960s. One of the resort's most legendary hospitality pioneers, Iris O'Connell, died at the grand age of 101 in a Dunedin nursing home this month. Mrs O'Connell and husband Jim O'Connell, moved to Queenstown from Invercargill in 1937 to buy what was then the nine-room Beach House, along with Mr O'Connell's sister Mary.
"Sometimes I think we must have been pretty foolhardy – it was really stepping out," she told the Mountain Scene newspaper in 1990.
It was a difficult time to launch a business with the onset of World War II, but trade picked up after the war when the Government organised free holidays for returned servicemen. By the 1960 the pair had expanded, buying the neighboring Queenstown Borough City Garrison Hall and opening their iconic hotel, O'Connell's, on the site of O'Connell's Pavilion, which still carries their name today.