Warwick Resort’s Pina Colada cocktails identified as potential cause

A mother and daughter are returning home to Sydney after an “ideal break” turned into a “worst nightmare” when they were hospitalised after a suspected alcohol poisoning at a holiday resort in Fiji.

David Sandoe, whose daughter Tanya and granddaughter Georgia Sandoe-Simpson, told the ABC the women were “very well considering what they’d been through” and were waiting in an airport lounge after being discharged from hospital following a one-week holiday that started last Monday.

It comes after the country’s tourism minister told local media piña colada cocktails will be sent for testing in Australia after seven tourists fell ill at the island’s Warwick resort.

Sandoe’s daughter and grandaughter were among four Australian women, aged 18 to 56, and three other tourists rushed to hospital with suspected alcohol poisoning after drinking ready-made cocktails on Saturday afternoon.

Sandoe said the other two Australians hospitalised were also a mother and daughter from NSW. He said the women had been “banded together with the camaraderie that happens with these sorts of incidents”.

“It’s very difficult to take a call at 11 o’clock at night, and your daughter and granddaughter are away, and your daughter says that they’ve been poisoned and are in hospital,” he said. “It’s your worst nightmare really.”

Tourism Minister Viliame Gavoka told Fiji news outlet FBC News the drinks being investigated were pre-packaged piña coladas served from the resort’s Suva Wing Bar, and they would be sent to Australia for analysis. He said the same drinks were served at other bars, but no other guests had become ill.

“The whole case is quite mystifying, but we are doing everything we can in terms of the health ministry and the police to really determine what happened on that evening when these people were served with piña colada in one of these bars,” Gavoka told FBC News.