VacationSelector

Athens or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Athens
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat 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.

AthensMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
AthensMelbourne
Score4855
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km1419
Coast distance6 km4 km
Water distance6 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 6 points.6
AthensMelbourne
Score6975
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4311,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2529
Museums & heritage. Athens leads by 24 points.24
AthensMelbourne
Score7349
Museums within 10 km12242
Museums within 2 km of centre7824
Share of museums within 2 km %6457
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Athens leads by 7 points.7
AthensMelbourne
Score8174
Drinking venues within 4 km2,7181,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3541,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5062
Nightclubs within 4 km136124
Nature & day trips. Athens leads by 2 points.2
AthensMelbourne
Score4543
Protected land share 50 km %56
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5081
Park area within 2 km128 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Athens leads by 11 points.11
AthensMelbourne
Score7160
Tourist attractions within 2 km6826
Park area within 2 km128 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Athens leads by 18 points.18
AthensMelbourne
Score7557
Notable places within 2 km291103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Athens leads by 24 points.24
AthensMelbourne
Score7450
Price level global55.890.2
Daily budget€125
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 2 points.2
AthensMelbourne
Score7476
Monthly daytime high13.4 °C to 34.5 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall6 mm to 86 mm45 mm to 69 mm
Dry months70
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
Athens
13
14
17
21
27
32
34
35
30
24
19
15
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Athens
15
15
15
16
19
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Athens
59
46
41
31
19
7
7
6
24
39
74
86
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Athens
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Athens
5
5
7
8
10
12
13
12
9
7
5
4
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. Athens: 1991-2020 normals, Athens / Athenai / Pláka (2.2 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAthensMelbourne
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 20 m
€95-237
ATH · 20 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
11 h 20 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
4 h 10 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 30 m
€286-308
ATH · 20 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
10 h 45 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
New DelhiDEL
6 h 30 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Abu DhabiAUH
4 h 30 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
14 h 20 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

MeasureAthensMelbourne
Official languageGreekEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation74 m31 m
Main airportAthens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH)20 km from centre171 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureAthensMelbourne
City population643,4525,350,705
People per km²16,499535
Museums within 10 km8842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre8286
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Athens 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.