You can book a ticket package that comes with transport. It's basically like a day tour. The shuttle bus picks you up from your hotel and takes you to the tour depot, where you get on the next (bigger) bus that takes you to Universal. On the way back, you bypass the depot and the big bus will just drop you back at your hotel.
For us, it was a good compromise between cheap and easy, but if there's a few of you going it might not work out so cheap. There were only 2 of us. To work out how much just the transport would cost, you'd have to work out the difference between the regular ticket price and the ticket price with transport, and multiply by the number of people going.
It was a bit of mucking around in the morning with the stop at the tour depot, but we still arrived just after opening. I think we were picked up at about 8am. It was a long day, and we would have left earlier if we could. If you want more flexibility, booking a car service would really be your only answer. Depending on how many of you are going, it might not work out that much more expensive anyway.
