It’s always nice to receive a perk or two after booking a hotel room. Maybe it’s a complimentary gift a worker at reception hands you when you check in. Perhaps it’s a couple of chocolates on your pillow, or some complimentary bottles of water waiting for you on your nightstand.
That’s what TikToker Evamaria Foltz (@evamariafoltz) thought she was getting after booking a stay at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta with her husband and their kids. Her husband drank out of what he believed to be a complimentary bottle of Aquafina water in their room.
It ended up being filled with vodka—at least, that’s what they think the liquid was.
Foltz started recording after her husband drank out of the bottle and posted the video to TikTok, where it’s received over 206,000 views.
Her husband rinses his mouth in the bathroom sink when the video starts. “My husband just took a sip of some of the water that was right here, and it says, ‘Stay hydrated. Compliments of Marriott Bonvoy,’” Foltz says. “Luckily it wasn’t our kids, and he instantly spit it out into this recycling bin, and he said it burned.”
Through text overlay, Foltz said their 2-year-old actually “did drink some of it.” (She later elaborates in a follow-up video.)
Foltz shows off the blue recycling bin along with the Aquafina bottle containing the liquid her husband says burned his lips. “And I think it’s vodka. The bottle smells like vodka, but I don’t want to touch it because I already washed my hands,” she says.
Foltz says they called the front desk and asked for a worker to come to the room. She says when they called her back, “they asked if we can come down and talk to them,” which Foltz says is difficult since they have “two small children.”
“Like, yes, we can, but … like, why can’t you just come up here?” she questions.
Her husband continues to rinse his mouth out. As a text overlay in the clip indicates, they didn’t know what the substance inside of the bottle was, even though they think it could be vodka.
Her husband says that his mouth went entirely “numb” after taking a drink. “Like alcohol,” he says before adding, “It was clearly not water.”
At the end of the clip, Foltz adds in another overlay: “I recorded our interview with security and hotel management also they have not to this point offered us any sort of compensation or anything to try to make this right.”
@evamariafoltz Complimentary water provided by westin was actually vodka and our child drank some of it
♬ original sound – evamaria
In follow-up videos, the TikToker answered several questions from commenters. “Does no one check the seal?” one questioned.
In response, Foltz said that while they had brought their own water with them to drink, they figured why not drink the complimentary bottles being provided to them by the hotel. In this video, she also reveals she and her child drank a Gatorade that she tried to dilute with the water bottle in question. “I gave [our 2-year-old] the Gatorade-diluted water, not thinking because we had also brought out own water, and he took a sip of it, and he gagged. He was like, ‘It’s sour,’” she says. “So I took a sip of it, and I swallowed it, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is the same bottle.’” She doubles down on this in another video when responding to a viewer who said: “How are you unaware in the moment your child consumed it but so sure of it after the fact?”
Foltz said in the comments section of her original video that they “called poison control and are monitoring our 2 year old.”
“In theory, we should’ve checked the seal—I understand. But this is a nice hotel. We paid $300 to stay one night at. We assumed that the water bottle was fine to drink and that it would have been inspected, I guess, if they’re offering it to us for free,” she elaborates in another follow-up.
In that video, Foltz also addresses speculation that a Dragon Con—which was held in Atlanta Aug 31-Sept. 4—attendee who was staying at the hotel had filled up the bottle with vodka and that the hotel failed to clean the room properly.
Numerous commenters thought the bottle being left there, however, was an honest mistake that could’ve happened in a variety of ways. “Maybe the cleaning crew grabbed a bottle from a different room thinking it was unopened and decided to put it back on the trolley inadvertently left,” one person speculated.
“More than likely it was the person before and the staff didn’t check. I would go to the hospital just incase!” another wrote.
“The person who had the room prior probably filled it with something else and housekeeping didn’t think to replace it thinking it was unopened,” a third said.
One commenter, who claimed they used to work in the hotel industry, shared one reason why the hotel haven’t offered the guests anything. “We never compensated anything except little things. Anything else would be considered us taking blame for that incident,” they said.
According to Foltz, she and her husband have “already called [their] lawyer” regarding the incident.
The Daily Dot has reached out to the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta via phone and is awaiting a response and to Foltz via both TikTok comment and Instagram direct message.
