Passport? Money? Sun hat? Semi-skimmed milk?

Tesco's bold move into rolling out virtual shops as part of a two week trial at Gatwick Airport is, in many ways, rather innovative. Not for the technology – this sort of thing is the backbone of Japanese vending machine culture and has already been successful for Tesco itself in Korea and Covent Garden, as well as for Ocado in London last summer and Birmingham this –  but more for the it's boldness as an off-the-wall ad campaign for its multichannel (or should that now be ‘omni-channel’?) offering in general and it's grocery app in particular.

As our story this week reveals, Tesco has installed ten interactive screens the size of vending machines in Gatwick's North Terminal with the top line mission of getting consumers who are about to jet off on their holidays to pre-order their victuals – bread, milk, cheese, olive oil, wine; to name but a few of the 80 items on offer – so that they can be delivered just after the happy holiday makers step through the door of their house all tanned and relaxed. (WARNING: this is assuming that French air traffic controllers don't unleash sudden industrial action as you wait to board your homeward bound Airbus and you sit in Alicante knowing that your groceries are rotting on your doorstep or have been taken back to the warehouse.)

But joking aside, really what these virtual shops do is advertise in a very large and shiny way that if you download the Tesco app onto your smartphone you can do your shopping where ever you may roam. But is it such a great idea? For starters, if I had battled my way through security and was finally in the departure lounge waiting to jet off to the sun, the last thing it'd want to do is my shopping.

But, I may be prompted to do it the day before I head home using the app from the comfort of my sun lounger, hotel wifi permitting. I may also be reminded that I have the app and I might just start doing my shopping from it again. So perhaps the mega-omni-retailer is on to something.

But what's in it for Tesco? The retailer is adamant that multichannel retailing — or “offering the consumer as many easy and convenient ways to shop at Tesco as possible”, in the company's own parlance – is its future. But not at the expense of pushing people from one channel to another, but in being so convenient that new people start to use its channels.

And this is really the driver behind the trial at Gatwick. It lets Tesco push new people to its app, get existing app users to reignite their usage (and perhaps this time stay sticky – which is crucial: as revealed in the news below, according to comScore only one in eight European smartphone users have bought anything through their smartphone). The services could also make loyal Tesco mobile and online shoppers feel even more warm and fuzzy toward their favourite supermarket.

But it also serves another even more useful purpose for Tesco: it lets the company see whether consumers will shop using these virtual shop fronts as part of the shopping mix. If they do then the company will no doubt roll them out elsewhere at travel hubs and all sorts of other places, including perhaps their own storefronts (for the gentleman shoppers amongst us – they may even think of putting them in pubs, at football grounds or even the bookies). It is in essence a proof of concept of something that could either cut Tesco’s store costs or extend the reach of the company to many, many, many new locations and tap into a whole new way of shopping.

I went to the launch of the service at Gatwick and have no idea if I had just seen a really expensive but cool ad campaign for an app, or the future of shopping? Even if the former is the case, and given that Webcredible has found that UK consumers only use an average of four apps regularly – and they are the four they consider most useful, as our story below shows – getting consumers to include Tesco’s grocery app as one of these ‘can’t live without’ apps is probably worth this sort of elaborate marketing. And who knows, it may even actually fulfil a consumer demand, I just can’t tell. Perhaps I need to jet off to a beach somewhere and think about it?