VacationSelector

Amsterdam or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Amsterdam
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on year-round weather and beaches & swimming 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.

AmsterdamMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score4055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km3319
Coast distance24 km4 km
Water distance24 km4 km
Places to eat. Amsterdam leads by 8 points.8
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score8375
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,9571,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4429
Museums & heritage. Amsterdam leads by 31 points.31
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score8049
Museums within 10 km9842
Museums within 2 km of centre6924
Share of museums within 2 km %7057
Unesco sites within 50 km51
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 4 points.4
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score7074
Drinking venues within 4 km1,5431,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,0781,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7062
Nightclubs within 4 km114124
Nature & day trips. Amsterdam leads by 17 points.17
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score6043
Protected land share 50 km %216
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8281
Park area within 2 km49 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Amsterdam leads by 8 points.8
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score6860
Tourist attractions within 2 km7426
Park area within 2 km49 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Amsterdam leads by 11 points.11
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score6857
Notable places within 2 km196103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Amsterdam leads by 8 points.8
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score5850
Price level global79.290.2
Daily budget€181—
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 19 points.19
AmsterdamMelbourne
Score5776
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.1 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 85 mm45 mm to 69 mm
Dry months00
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
Amsterdam
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
7
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Amsterdam
6
5
6
8
12
15
17
19
17
15
11
8
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Amsterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Amsterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Amsterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Amsterdam: 1991-2020 normals, De Bilt (35.3 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAmsterdamMelbourne
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
15 h 0 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€166-175
AMS · 12 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
13 h 0 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€318-346
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
11 h 35 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
12 h 45 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
6 h 30 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SantiagoSCL
14 h 45 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 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

MeasureAmsterdamMelbourne
Official languageDutchEnglish
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 number112 or 911000
Elevation-2 m31 m
Main airportAmsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS)12 km from centre287 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureAmsterdamMelbourne
City population921,4685,350,705
People per km²4,208535
Museums within 10 km10142
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km51
Distinct cuisines in the centre9886
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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