# Litre bottles and travel exclusives

Two things sit on the airport shelf that your supermarket does not have: the litre bottle, and the bottling made only for travel retail. Both are genuine reasons to buy airside. Both are also where comparison quietly stops working, which is precisely why they are there.

## The litre is the airport's format

Domestic shelves in most of the world sell spirits at 70 or 75 centilitres. Airport shelves favour the litre, and in some regions the 1.75 litre. The larger bottle usually costs less per litre than the smaller one, so it is frequently the better buy, but it is never directly comparable to the bottle you priced at home. Divide before you decide: a litre and a 70 centilitre bottle are different quantities of the same thing, and the shelf is not going to do the arithmetic for you.

The litre also eats your allowance faster. Where a limit is written as one litre of spirits, one airport bottle is the whole allowance and the smaller format would have left you room for something else.

## Travel exclusives are a real category

A travel exclusive is a bottling a producer makes for airport shops and does not sell on the high street. Some are substantial: a cask finish, a higher strength, an expression that exists nowhere else. Some are a standard liquid in a different box with a name that suggests more than that. Both are sold in the same aisle.

The way to tell them apart is the specification rather than the packaging. Strength, age where one is stated, cask type where one is stated: if those match the standard bottling and only the carton differs, you are paying for the carton. If they do not match, you are buying something you cannot get at home, and the question becomes whether you want it, not whether it is a saving.

## There is no home price, which cuts both ways

An exclusive has no supermarket comparison, so the usual check is unavailable. What remains is the comparison across airports, and it is more useful here than anywhere else: the same exclusive at the same retailer regularly differs by airport, and nobody is going to tell you that at the counter. [Browse the travel exclusives](/exclusives) and look at what each shop is asking, with the date beside it.

## Gift packs, twin packs and the glass

A gift pack with two tumblers is a bottle plus two tumblers. A twin pack is two bottles, and worth buying only if you wanted two. Both are priced so the comparison to a plain bottle is awkward, and both are perfectly reasonable purchases once you have made the comparison anyway.

## The short version

Compare by the litre. Read the specification, not the box. Treat an exclusive as a purchase rather than a saving, and then check it across your route: [set the airports you will pass through](/savings).