VacationSelector

Alicante or Kyoto?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Alicante
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nightlife with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

AlicanteKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 60 points.60
AlicanteKyoto
Score7717
Swim season months55
Beaches 10 km330
Coast distance1 km47 km
Water distance1 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteKyoto
Score6684
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8675,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3122
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 30 points.30
AlicanteKyoto
Score4272
Museums within 10 km14132
Museums within 2 km of centre1151
Share of museums within 2 km %7939
Unesco sites within 50 km24
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 29 points.29
AlicanteKyoto
Score5180
Drinking venues within 4 km5913,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre4882,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8373
Nightclubs within 4 km5426
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteKyoto
Score4022
Protected land share 50 km %72
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 24 points.24
AlicanteKyoto
Score4266
Tourist attractions within 2 km1362
Park area within 2 km60 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km14
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 26 points.26
AlicanteKyoto
Score2652
Notable places within 2 km1879
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 1 points.1
AlicanteKyoto
Score7170
Price level global60.862.4
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 25 points.25
AlicanteKyoto
Score8762
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm40 mm to 232 mm
Dry months110
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Alicante
17
18
20
22
24
28
30
31
29
25
21
18
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteKyoto
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
DusseldorfDUS, NRN
2 h 30 m
€130-152
ALC · 10 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
CopenhagenCPH
3 h 15 m
€110-130
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
HelsinkiHEL
4 h 15 m
€205-254
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 15 m
€128-199
1 stop
VLC · 127 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
HamburgHAM, XFW, LBC
2 h 55 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureAlicanteKyoto
Official languageSpanishJapanese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112Police 110, fire 119
Elevation3 m51 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteKyoto
City population366,2211,463,723
People per km²1,8191,768
Museums within 10 km876
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km24
Distinct cuisines in the centre5289
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Kyoto somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.