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“Buy now, pay later” has become a retail fixture seemingly overnight, and Cyber Monday is set to be the services’ biggest sales day yet. But as these payment options offer customers freedom and flexibility, are they also opening the door to a wave of unregulated debt?

BRITS will soon feel the squeeze after the announcement of the Budget.

Yesterday Rachel Reeves announced plans for multiple price hikes in the UK from a rise in tax on alcohol and cigarettes to the rising cost of Air Passenger Duty.

The Chancellor, on November 26, unveiled a raft of tax rises including that on booze.

It will see some fan-favourite tipples face a rise in price at the supermarket from a four pack of lager to gin and whiskey – and there are fears this will impact pubs too.

The cost of cigarettes has risen from the average price (for a 20 pack) around £16.78 up to £17.74.

And in 2027, the government will increase all rates of Air Passenger Duty (APD) in line with the rate of inflation – which will make going abroad more expensive.

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So if you quite rightly are looking for an affordable break where alcohol and a box of cigarettes is dirt cheap – not to mention getting out of the country, then here are some options for you.

Bulgaria

Under four hours from the UK is Bulgaria known for its sunny beach resorts with cheap booze and all-inclusive hotels

One unbeatable place for that is Sunny Beach on the Black Sea coast which is well-known for being cheap and cheerful.

On the Beach has offers for a 7-night stay from June 2, 2026, at Sunny Day Club for just £265pp including flights from Manchester on a bed and breakfast basis.

Eating out won’t break the bank if you head away from the main streets – a mid-range meal for two can cost as little as £10 each.

And if you’re a smoker, then Bulgaria is a great place to buy cigarettes – and again, the cheapest.

The retail price for a pack of 20 cigarettes in Bulgaria according to Statista is €3.69 (£3.23).

If you’d prefer a break right now, then check out Bansko which is two hours from the capital of Sofia and is one of the cheapest places in Europe for a pint.

Experts at hoppa recently analysed dozens of European locations to find the most budget-friendly depending on factors like cost of a hotel and the cost of beer.

Here you can pick up a pint for as little as 90p – and a stay in a 3-star hotel which averages out at £57.

If you’re looking for a last-minute winter ski holiday, it’s also one of the most affordable options.

Bansko came third cheapest in the Post Office Travel Money Ski Report 2025.

Sun Travel found a five-night stay for two people from £209pp, which includes flights from London Stansted with LoveHolidays.

Starting on December 7, 2025, you can stay in the three-star Apart Hotel Dream at the foot of the Pirin Mountain, and it’s just 5 minutes from the cable lift.

There’s an indoor pool as well as a restaurant, coffee shop and a cosy lobby bar set by a log fire.

Poland

Second on the list for the cheapest place to buy cigarettes is Poland where a pack of 20 costs on average €4.88 (£4.28).

If you’re looking to get away just for the weekend, then head to Poznan in Poland.

The fifth largest city in Poland, is great for autumn and winter weekend breaks especially if you are on a budget

Beer is cheap, costing around £2.87 a pint for a local brew while coffee is less than £2.80.

Of course you can always make a week out of it – LoveHolidays has an offer for a seven-night stay at Campanile from December 5, 2025, from £199pp including flights from Bristol.

Over the week, that works out at just £28.43 per person per day.

Latvia

While it might not be a place that comes to your mind when scrolling through holidays, Latvia has some crackingly cheap deals.

If you fancy a break in the New Year, then you can go with LoveHolidays to Riga from London Stansted from £22.71pppn – including flights.

Stay in The Dodo in Riga for seven nights from December 6; it’s a budget-friendly hotel but still has free Wi-Fi, comfy beds, private bathrooms, TV, bars, and breakfast options.

Not to mention when you get there it won’t cost you much either – Riga was named Europe’s best value city for a short break by  Post Office Travel Money City Costs Barometer.

On average, a cup of coffee in Riga costs £2.80 and beer costs £3.50, although you can buy beer for as little as €1 (88p) from supermarkets.

Return airport or bus transfers were relatively cheap, costing £3.50 on average.

Turkey

For the sun-seekers amongst you then of course, Turkey is an easy win.

From Antalya to Istanbul, there are plenty of options – Marmaris is ranked as the cheapest coastal resort, offering low prices for a basket of tourist goods

And if you want to plan a getaway this December, you can still enjoy highs of 17C.

With LastMinute.com, you can enjoy five-night stay at the Hotel Unver in Marmaris from £127pp including flights from London Stansted.

The hotel has a swimming pool, free Wi-Fi and is just a few streets away from the beach.

Mains at a restaurant in Marmaris cost around 400 Turkish Lira (TL) in
£7.12 – and a cup of Turkish coffee in Marmaris can cost anywhere from  Turkish Lira (12p).

And even if you fancy a hot summer in Turkey – you can still get great deals now like at the Belpoint Beach Hotel in Antalya.

With LoveHolidays there’s a deal for a 7-night all-inclusive break from £239pp including flights from London Stansted on June 11, 2026.

The three-star hotel has an outdoor swimming pool with an aquapark, restaurants and bars.

Spain

You can always trust Spain to deliver and to make matters even better you can be there in two hours.

The average price of a pack of 20 cigarettes is €5.99 (£5.24), and as for alcohol a pint of domestic beer can be as little as €3 (£2.63).

Costa del Sol, region in the south of Spain, is regarded as one of the cheapest places for a holiday.

Another popular destination is the city of Malaga – with LoveHolidays you can book a stay at Easyhotel Malaga City Centre from £199pp.

If you want a break in January, it’s a great choice for sightseeing, and enjoying the cheap meals and drinks Spain has to offer.

You can fly there from London Luton on January 7, 2026 and stay for seven nights.

Or if you fancy somewhere coastal and some sun, you can stay at the cosy Marissal by Dorobe Hotels with LoveHolidays – a two-star boutique hotel with just 23 rooms – and it’s two minutes from the beach.

A seven-night stay from June 12, 2026 will set you back just £259pp including direct flights to Malaga from London Gatwick.

For more budget spots, check out these winter sun destinations from your nearest airport – with 7-night holidays to Turkey, Tunisia and Spain.

And hear from one man who travels to Spain every month – 12 stunning and cheap destinations Spaniards love that Brits have never heard of.

Here’s the destination where you don’t have to pay tax at duty free…

Gibraltar, the Mediterranean destination south of Spain, is the perfect place for Brits to stock up on alcohol, bag a cheap perfume and a designer handbag.

The duty free is especially low because of Gibraltar’s tax policies, specifically the absence of VAT and excise taxes.

Sun writer Adele Cooke is half Gibraltarian and reveals she often sees hordes of tourists descend on the airport to get their goods.

She told us: “Often you’ll see people on cruise ships all get off to stock up on the goods. My dad likes to stock up his alcohol trolley while we’re there too.”

When it comes to alcohol, Gibraltar has some great offers at duty-free – for example, you can pick up a litre of The Famous Grouse whisky for as little as £8.15.

A litre of Bacardi starts at £10.75 (£20 in the UK) and Captain Morgan rum at £11 (also £20 in the UK).

One litre of Jägermeister costs just £12.50 (£25 in the UK), the duty-free shop even sells one litre bottles of Glen’s Vodka for £3.40 (£17 in the UK).

You can buy it at the airport, but some airlines won’t let you board with it

If you’re planning on jetting off abroad any time soon, it’s worth knowing that you might not be able to bring a common item, typically costing around £3, on board your flight. Ryanair and Jet2 both have a clear ban, but you can bring the same product onto easyJet or TUI services.

While many airline rules are consistent across carriers, certain restrictions differ depending on your chosen operator. When travelling by plane, passengers often browse airport retail outlets and restaurants, purchasing everything from duty-free goods to refreshments and snacks.

But before spending money in the departure lounge, it’s handy to know that hot drinks cannot be taken onto certain flights. Many travellers opt for a caffeine boost at the airport, and there are normally plenty of opportunities to purchase a tea or a coffee before you’re called to the gate.

But you’ll be required to finish that drink prior to boarding with Ryanair or Jet2, according to their individual policies. Ryanair states it “cannot allow passengers to board the plane with hot drinks” for safety considerations, whilst Jet2’s website confirms: “You may not bring hot food or hot drinks onboard the aircraft”.

Should you be flying with TUI or easyJet, however, you’re permitted to carry your airport coffee onto the aircraft, provided it has a secure lid. As well as this, recent post-Brexit rules mean certain items purchased before departure cannot be transported into any EU nations, and this applies irrespective of which airline you’re travelling with, reports the Liverpool Echo.

You’re not allowed to bring meat or dairy into the EU, even if they’re part of food items like sandwiches, regardless of whether you purchased them at the airport or elsewhere.

The U.S. Army has set a goal of buying one million new drones of all types over the next two to three years. This comes as senior officials within the service have acknowledged that it continues to lag behind global trends when it comes to fielding uncrewed aerial systems, especially weaponized types within smaller units. The Army’s planned drone shopping spree could also include large numbers of longer-range one-way attack types, something TWZ laid out a detailed case for doing just a few months ago.

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll talked about his service’s new drone acquisition plans in a recent phone interview with Reuters from Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. The service also hopes the purchases will foster an industrial base that can churn out uncrewed aerial systems at similarly high rates for years to come.

“We expect to purchase at least a million drones within the next two to three years,” Driscoll told Reuters. “And we expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough that we could activate to manufacture however many drones we would need.”

The report from Reuters does not provide a detailed breakdown of what might be included in that million-drone bundle. It does indicate that Driscoll was talking primarily about smaller weaponized types, such as first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones and ones configured to drop small munitions. These kinds of uncrewed aerial systems have existed in various forms for years, but have now been fully thrust into the public consciousness by their daily use on both sides of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

“Driscoll and Picatinny’s top commander, Major General John Reim, spoke to Reuters about how the United States was taking lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has been characterized by drone deployments on an unprecedented scale,” according to that outlet. “Ukraine and Russia each produce roughly 4 million drones a year, but China is probably able to produce more than double that number, Driscoll said.”

“Driscoll said he fundamentally wanted to change how the Army saw drones – more like expendable ammunition rather than an ‘exquisite’ piece of equipment,” Reuters‘ story added.

This latter point is also directly in the stated aims behind a sweeping array of drone policy and other changes the Pentagon announced back in July. The main focus of that initiative, described as “unleashing U.S. military drone dominance,” is to accelerate the fielding of huge numbers of uncrewed aerial systems, especially weaponized types, across the entire U.S. military, as you can read more about here.

All this being said, the Army’s plans to buy at least a million new drones could easily include a wide array of types intended to perform an equally diverse set of missions. As mentioned, long-range kamikaze drones in the vein of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136 could be part of this equation, as well. Russia also regularly uses variants and derivatives of that design, including ones it now produces domestically, in attacks on targets in Ukraine. Forces in Ukraine have been moving to field their own comparable designs, among many other one-way attack types.

Directly influenced by Israeli kamikaze drones, the Shahed-136 has become something of a global standard for uncrewed aircraft of this type, with similarly-sized delta-winged designs steadily emerging globally, including in the United States and China. Developments out of China include the Feilong-300D from state-run conglomerate North Industries Group Corporation, which is reportedly particularly geared toward low-cost, high-volume production. So far, the examples being built in the United States have been sold largely as training aids reflecting growing threats to friendly forces. TWZ‘s feature in September delved deeply into the benefits they could offer to the U.S. military as operational weapons in line with broader long-range fires initiatives across the services.

Another Group 3 threat system (target) broadly similar to the FLM 136 G3 ‘reverse-engineered Shahed’ threat system.

“The MQM-172 Arrowhead is designed as a high-speed, maneuverable one-way-attack and target drone platform—perfect for realistic threat emulation, training, and… https://t.co/qaEanNEC8T pic.twitter.com/DwxlGypV4E

— AirPower 2.0 (MIL_STD) (@AirPowerNEW1) August 12, 2025

This is 🇨🇳China’s version of the Geran-2 Drone, The Feilong-300D Suicide Drone, a low cost-High performance drone, and the future of combat.

It carries a High-explosive warhead, and has a range of over 1000km in just a cost of $10,000 USD. pic.twitter.com/XZBEGW1AoK

— PLA Military Updates (@PLA_MilitaryUpd) November 2, 2025

“Absolutely,” Maj. Gen. James “Jay” Bartholomee, head of the Army’s Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, said in response to a question from our Howard Altman about interest in Shahed-like drones at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) annual symposium in October. “We are behind on long-range sensing and long-range launched-effect strike.”

“I think we do,” Army Lt. Gen. Charles Costanza, commander of V Corps, which has its main headquarters at Fort Knox in Kentucky and a forward command post in Poland, said separately at the AUSA gathering in response to a similar question from Howard Altman about the need for Shahed-type drones.

Costanza also offered a blunt assessment of the service’s work to field various tiers of drones, as well as capabilities to counter the growing threats they pose.

“We’re behind. I’ll just be candid. I think we know we’re behind,” the V Corps commander said. “We aren’t moving fast enough.”

“And it really took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [in 2022], and the way they’re innovating, and Ukrainians are innovating, to realize, hey, we need to move fast,” he added.

For Ukraine, moving fast has become a matter of life or death, and rapidly iterating capabilities has become critical because of the speed at which countermeasures are also developed.

Army units in Europe have been very much at the forefront of current efforts to accelerate and expand the fielding of new weaponized drones, as well as counter-drone systems. However, some of those activities have drawn criticism for how much they still appear to be behind the curve, especially compared to what is regularly seen on battlefields in Ukraine.

Army Secretary Driscoll’s million-drone plan is clearly a new push toward a real paradigm shift, in line with the direction from the Pentagon in July. At the same time, there are significant questions about whether the service will be able to even come close to reaching its new procurement goals, especially when it comes to funding, contracting processes, and the capacity of the U.S. industrial base. The policy changes rolled out earlier this year did include several aimed at simplifying contracting processes.

Just today, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced further plans for even more sweeping changes to acquisition processes across the U.S. military. The goal here is also to fundamentally change how the Pentagon works with the U.S. defense industrial base, all with an eye toward moving things along faster.

“This relates to the whole industrial base, and most importantly, to the large primes [prime contractors] that we do business with today,” Hegseth said in a speech earlier today. “These large defense primes need to change, to focus on speed and volume and divest their own capital to get there.”

We’re moving from a slow, contractor-dominated system (marked by limited competition, vendor lock, and cost overruns) to an industrial base that drives speed, innovation, and investment—powered by America’s unmatched ability to scale quickly. pic.twitter.com/n9lYE02WTr

— DOW Rapid Response (@DOWResponse) November 7, 2025

As TWZ often notes, there has been steadily growing interest across the U.S. military in recent years when it comes to engaging with smaller or otherwise non-traditional companies, including to help meet complex requirements on aggressive timelines.

“Instead of partnering with larger defense companies, he [Driscoll] said the Army wanted to work with companies that were producing drones that could have commercial applications as well,” according to Reuters.

“We want to partner with other drone manufacturers who are using them for Amazon deliveries and all the different use cases,” Driscoll said.

Whether or not the Army ultimately acquires a million new drones in the next few years, and what is included in that mix, remains to be seen. However, Secretary Driscoll has started the clock now on what could be a transformational shift for the service when it comes to fielding unrewed aerial systems.

Contact the author: [email protected]