VacationSelector

Alicante or Sydney?

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

Your match

Alicante
56
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

AlicanteSydney
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteSydney
Score7760
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km33160
Coast distance1 km7 km
Water distance1 km7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 12 points.12
AlicanteSydney
Score6678
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8672,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3131
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 9 points.9
AlicanteSydney
Score4251
Museums within 10 km1444
Museums within 2 km of centre1120
Share of museums within 2 km %7945
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 24 points.24
AlicanteSydney
Score5175
Drinking venues within 4 km5912,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre4881,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8369
Nightclubs within 4 km54120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteSydney
Score4058
Protected land share 50 km %710
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5952
Park area within 2 km60 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteSydney
Score4264
Tourist attractions within 2 km1337
Park area within 2 km60 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 34 points.34
AlicanteSydney
Score2660
Notable places within 2 km18123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 21 points.21
AlicanteSydney
Score7150
Price level global60.890.2
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 6 points.6
AlicanteSydney
Score8781
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm55 mm to 121 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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteSydney
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 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

MeasureAlicanteSydney
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation3 m6 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteSydney
City population366,2215,450,496
People per km²1,819449
Museums within 10 km838
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre5279
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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