We have a number of Airport Guides and as foreign exchange is so closely associated with holidays and airports we decided to look really closely into the currency market and unravel the secrets of getting the best deal on FX. We have now started to publish our results with a whole set of pages on each Airport Guide to help you when purchasing your holiday cash.

There are now many different methods of spending abroad, and long gone are the times that you could just use foreign currency and travellers cheques. One of the big changes has been that currency providers are now offering pre-paid currency cards, which work in a similar way to a debit card, you pre load them with currency and spend or withdraw cash using them abroad. We have researched the best of the best currency cards and compared them to save you time and money.

Compare the best pre-paid currency cards.

Most people also still want to have cash on them which can be used for smaller purchases, or in places which don’t take cards, so we have covered the bureau de change available at the airports and the FX branches on the high street too!

One other method of spending abroad is to use a credit or debit card. There are as many charges and fees associated with these methods as any, but it could actually work out to be one of the cheapest or most expensive ways of getting your holiday money, depending on the card you have, so we have provided information to help you make the decision to spend, or not to spend!

Another thing we have done is to strip back the jargon used by the foreign currency exchange providers to it’s most basic form and explain what each charge, fee and added extra means, helping you understand the way to get the most from your money without being baffled by the language used by the travel industry. This page also contains our Top Ten Travel Money Tips

Flying is an increasingly popular method of transport and often the fastest and even cheapest way to get abroad. This inevitably involves visiting airports around the UK which can be pretty confusing places sometimes and even for frequent fliers there tend to be a lot of rules and regulations that must be adhered to, along with changes in flight times which it’s good to keep up to speed on before setting off for the airport!

We set up our Airport Guides years ago, but gave them a fresh new look last year, which has proven to be very popular so far. We have not stopped working on them since though, and have recently worked hard to get the transportation section up to date and give it a fresh new look to make sure everyone can find what they are looking for.

There are 23 UK Airport Guides which we run so getting the new layout and content live on all of them will take a while longer, but here’s a sneak preview of things to come with the rest of them from the now live Gatwick airport transport page.

Transport to and from Gatwick Airport

The transport pages now cover many different methods to help you get to and from the airports. Gatwick Airport for example, has links from trains, coaches, and buses as well as being easily accessible by car. The transport you choose is going to be based on many factors, so we have made sure we have thoroughly looked into each area of travel into and out of the airports and found the benefits and drawbacks applying across them all, to help you make the best decision to suit your needs. Take a look at the latest offers from our travel providers to make sure you are getting the best deal possible.

In addition to this page we will be creating dedicated pages for each transport provider telling you all about what you can expect from them, and the special deals available from that provider. These pages will also include things like routes offered and possibly booking engines to make booking easier.These are coming soon, so keep an eye out!

Special offers applying at the moment include no booking fee for all online bookings of a National Express coach. The opportunity to save up to 43% on train tickets and savings of up to 78% on your airport parking through us! We have also added a Google map to help you familiarise yourself with the location of the airports and plan your car journey.

Let us know what you think of the new design, and I will keep you updated on new additions to the Airport Guides as we go!

One of the first websites we did this on was our dedicated Airport Parking Shop service where visitors who are planning to travel to and from the UK’s airports can search around the top airport parking brokers and ensure they get the best deal on their airport parking.

Airport Parking Shop compares deals for parking at the major UK airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and Luton plus most of the smaller ones too. Covering 24 locations and over 100 airport car parks across the UK! We even cover parking at Dover ferry port. Passengers can take advantage of saving an average of 48% or £67.87 when comparing with all 6 of the biggest airport parking brokers in the UK airport car parks.

We recently conducted a survey (8th July 2009) of the UK’s airport parking facilities and found that passengers parking at Heathrow could save up to 78% on their long stay parking for a 2 week stay. The price of parking when paying at the gate at London Heathrow was £315 and when you shop around and book with Airport Parking Shop that price was reduced to £69.95! This is really staggering and even at some of the smaller airports you can find big savings. To park at Teesside airport costs £82 for 15 days when paid for at the gate, yet even on this relatively cheap price airport parking shop can take that price down to £30 – a saving of £52!

Parking at London City airport came out as the most expensive from our survey at a massive £546 for 2 weeks….however, when booked with us online this can be cut to £294!

This is just another one of the ways that we at Fubra like to make sure we find the best deals for consumers and we are very happy that the money saving comparison we provide through Airport Parking Shop is helping passengers all over the world use their money on their holiday rather than their parking!

The 23 individual websites, each dedicated to being the definitive resource for one UK airport, have a host of new features, updated content and a great user-friendly redesign. We’ve also done lots of work behind the scenes to ensure the sites are super fast, search engine friendly and appropriately commercialised.

You can see the results live on our flagship guide www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk.

The original guides were launched in 2003 to provide travellers with a one stop place to find out everything about UK airports. We noticed that there was an online airport information void, because the official airports either had very basic websites, or no website at all.

The guides were a great success, rising to the top of Google results and generating revenue through adverts and links to our other travel related sites Airport Parking Shop, Airport Hotel Shop and Car Hire Centre.

5 years on, we decided it was time to give the network a revamp. We’ve focused on ways to make the site easier and quicker to use, making sure the content is informative and up to date, and better ways to commercialise the sites without compromising our visitor’s experience.

New design

The new design, as shown here on www.liverpool-airport-guide.co.uk, is in keeping with the friendly, bright layout of the rest of the Guides Network and the new header makes each site instantly recognisable as part of the Airport Guides network. You can clearly see all the content in the left hand menu, and the main sections are highlighted by the clean-looking navigation bar at the top. Each page has either images or graphics to liven up the text

New features

Live arrivals and departures

We have partnered with flightstats.com so you can now view live flight departures and arrivals on all the Airport Guides, as shown on www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/flight-arrivals.html.

You can simply click ‘Go’ to view all flights arriving or departing in the next 2 hours, or search by flight number, to find out everything your flight, including details of delays and cancellations.

Maps

We’ve created detailed maps of each airport so you can see exactly where to go when you get to the airport. You can also see at a glance where each airport’s facilities are.

All the airports have terminal floor plans, and the airports with more than one terminal, like www.manchester-airport-guide.co.uk have a snazzy Flash map too.

Shopping and restaurant directory

We’ve compiled a comprehensive guide to all the shops in each airport. You can find out exactly which stores are in each airport, where they’re located and find out contact details and opening times for them.

Search box

We now have a search box in the top left hand corner of every site, which you can see here on www.newcastle-airport-guide.co.uk

This search, powered by Google, allows users to get straight to the content they need and displays it in a familiar format. It also displays adverts on the results page by using the search term to generate relevant ads.

Taxi directory

We’ve created a page with listings for taxi companies, so users can find the information to book their airport taxis on the Airport Guides. Eventually these will all be paid for listings. We’re now starting to get in touch with taxi companies – the response has been extremely positive so far. This page is for www.gatwick-airport-guide.co.uk, but you can see similar listings for all 23 UK airports.

Better commercialisation

External adverts

We’ve really thought about how to include carefully considered adverts which don’t detract from each site’s information. We’ve partnered with Google AdSense to deliver adverts which are relevant to the content of each page

We’ve also introduced 2 different styles of advert – a long 728 by 90 pixel ‘leaderboard’ and a 300 by 250 pixel ‘Mid Page Unit’ (MPU). This gives us greater flexibility as to where to put adverts, and allows us to place them where they don’t intrude on content – but are also prominently displayed to maximise clicks.

Cross promotion

Fubra also owns Airport Parking Shop, Airport Hotel Shop and Car Hire Centre, and the Airport Guides network is a perfect way of cross promoting our own sites. We’ve made each of our travel sites a feature on the relevant page, and placed the link to the site within the content.

We’ve also included bright image links to the sites beside the content to encourage people to click through.

What next?

A lot of hard work and careful thought has gone into improving the Airport Guides – but we’re not finished yet. Our next steps will be to continue to fact check and improve the content on each site, alongside strengthening affiliate links.

It’s early days, but the figures after the first day of the new design are pretty encouraging. The revenue has doubled, and we’ve seen an increase in visitors too. We expect the traffic to continue to rise as users start to find our new content through search engines.

Take a look at the new look guides, and let us know what you think.