As the summer holiday season progresses on, consumers in the UK are looking to get more out of their holiday budgets. Yet despite their best efforts to save on travel agent fees by booking online, some holidaymakers miss out by going to back to the online high street shops for their travel money. With some careful planning (and maybe a little bit of research) you can save around £40 on differences between currency rates of the high street shops! Some online high street providers are nearly 4% more expensive than dedicated online foreign exchange providers.

Attraction of the high street

The online landscape now resembles the offline landscape like never before with many high street properties as well as the major high street banks offering online travel services such insurance and currency exchange. Whilst branching out into new territories may seem like a great opportunity for the consumer to benefit from big name services, they often piggy back off specialist foreign exchange providers at a rate that is less favourable than going direct. As an example, some providers quote an average foreign currency exchange rate for Australian Dollar which was 3% more expensive than buying from a dedicated Forex provider. Even online high street banks were found to be nearly 3.5% more expensive.

Shop around to save money

As an example, let’s have a look at two long haul destinations that are likely to require a fair bit of travel money – trips to Australia and New Zealand. At the time of writing the benchmark dedicated foreign exchange provider (Travel FX) offered the Australian dollar at a rate of 1.714 and offered the New Zealand dollar at 2.096 to the pound. By comparison our high street forex provider gave a rate of 1.661 and 2.038 respectively. Let’s assume a family holiday of 5 needs around $2000 travel money for a three week trip. For our family travelling to Australia buying through the leading high street outlet would cost them around £1204 whereas buying through the dedicated forex provider would cost £1166 – a saving of £37. Similarly travelling to New Zealand shopping in the high street would cost you around £981 for $2000 NZD whereas with the forex provider it would cost £953 – a £27 saving. And that is based on online rates! On airport bureaux de change can be up to 10% more expensive than specialist currency providers.

It’s clear that with a little bit of investigation you can save a few pounds just by choosing your travel money provider a bit more carefully. Whilst it’s tempting to go for the big names it always pays to have a look around – use online comparison tools like travelmoney.moneysavingexpert.com or check out Travel FX for great deals on holiday currency rates for both AUD and NZD.

Notes: currency rates were taken on 20th July 2010