VacationSelector

Bangkok or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Bangkok
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families with your weighting.

Cape Town
57
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.

BangkokCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
BangkokCape Town
Score4060
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km029
Coast distance23 km1 km
Water distance23 km1 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 16 points.16
BangkokCape Town
Score8367
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,957650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2642
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
BangkokCape Town
Score4654
Museums within 10 km10325
Museums within 2 km of centre3020
Share of museums within 2 km %2980
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 36 points.36
BangkokCape Town
Score8347
Drinking venues within 4 km3,383483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4181
Nightclubs within 4 km7247
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 15 points.15
BangkokCape Town
Score5136
Protected land share 50 km %—6
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8342
Park area within 2 km42 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Bangkok leads by 21 points.21
BangkokCape Town
Score5736
Tourist attractions within 2 km3119
Park area within 2 km42 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Bangkok leads by 3 points.3
BangkokCape Town
Score4845
Notable places within 2 km6251
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 8 points.8
BangkokCape Town
Score9385
Price level global29.740.5
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 30 points.30
BangkokCape Town
Score5686
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months36
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
Bangkok
33
34
35
36
35
34
34
33
33
33
33
32
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 15 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 20 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
11 h 0 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 45 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
DohaDOH
6 h 55 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 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

MeasureBangkokCape Town
Official languageThaiEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyBaht (THB)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+2
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199112
Elevation2 m5 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year–12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokCape Town
City population5,676,6483,776,313
People per km²3,6191,538
Museums within 10 km5922
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre9165
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bangkok or Cape Town 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). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.