Shoppers filling their trolleys with cut-price tins of beans, £5 tents and own-brand wine from supermarket Aldi may soon also be loading up on bargain city-breaks along with the weekly groceries.
The chain, which has 400 outlets across the UK and whose motto is "spend a little, live a lot", is to start selling holidays, with prices to match those of the household products on its shelves, from January.
Three nights' skiing in Fieberbrunn near Kitzbühel in Austria will cost from £119 per person, four-star half-board, for example; a week in Tenerife would cost from £6.50 per person per night self-catering and a three-night city break to Rome from £33 per person per night B&B.
Aldi, which has 7,000 stores globally, already sells holidays in Austria, Switzerland and Germany - 1million of them since it started in 2003. And although the launch has been planned for some years, it couldn't have come at a better time, with the recession forcing increasing numbers of shoppers to seek the sort of bargains that come in yellow and black packaging.
"Our sales are up 26% this month, year on year, said Aldi group buying director Sarah Butler, "and half our customers are ABC1s now. We see a lot coming in also carrying Waitrose bags. The credit crunch gave a jolt to people to look to stores like Aldi to see what they can offer."
The deals will have a short shelf-life; six "mega" deals fitting a certain type of holiday — summer holidays first, then city breaks and ski trips — will be distributed on printed leaflets in the supermarkets for a two-week period, and customers will have four weeks to book them before they expire, to be replaced by another six deals. Further stock will be available on the website alditravel.co.uk, which goes live on January 8, with a total of 150 holidays displayed there. All must be booked through the website or phone line.
They won't all be the bargain basement equivalent of no-frills beans — accommodation will range from three-five star, with only one or two options in each destination, selected because they offer "something really special".
The focus will be on short-haul initially, including, for example, ski trips to Chamonix, Val d'Isère and Courcheval; summer holidays to the Algarve, Balearics and Aegean and city breaks in Rome, Vienna and Geneva, with 22 departure airports around the country. However, it may branch out to long-haul, such as China and the US, if there's the demand.
All bookings, even individual low-cost flights, will be protected up to the value of £5,000 under Aldi's own bonding scheme.
It's not the first supermarket to branch out into holidays, Asda has a travel website, asda-travel.co.uk, though it offers a much wider choice, and if others follow suit — discount cruises from Lidl and Netto perhaps? — supermarkets could be on their way to usurping travel agents on the high street.
