VacationSelector

Bangkok or Kyoto?

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 nature & day trips and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families 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.

BangkokKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Bangkok leads by 23 points.23
BangkokKyoto
Score4017
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance23 km47 km
Water distance23 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 1 points.1
BangkokKyoto
Score8384
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9575,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2622
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 26 points.26
BangkokKyoto
Score4672
Museums within 10 km103132
Museums within 2 km of centre3051
Share of museums within 2 km %2939
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 3 points.3
BangkokKyoto
Score8380
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3833,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3962,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4173
Nightclubs within 4 km7226
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 29 points.29
BangkokKyoto
Score5122
Protected land share 50 km %2
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %83100
Park area within 2 km42 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 9 points.9
BangkokKyoto
Score5766
Tourist attractions within 2 km3162
Park area within 2 km42 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km44
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 4 points.4
BangkokKyoto
Score4852
Notable places within 2 km6279
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 23 points.23
BangkokKyoto
Score9370
Price level global29.762.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Kyoto leads by 6 points.6
BangkokKyoto
Score5662
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm40 mm to 232 mm
Dry months30
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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
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. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokKyoto
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
4 h 5 m
€176-184
BKK · 26 km
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
SapporoCTS, OKD
6 h 35 m
no fares
DMK · 21 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
KaohsiungKHH
3 h 20 m
no fares
DMK · 21 km
3 h 0 m
€181-306
KIX · 81 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
6 h 25 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBangkokKyoto
Official languageThaiJapanese
CurrencyBaht (THB)Yen (JPY)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+9
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199Police 110, fire 119
Elevation2 m51 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokKyoto
City population5,676,6481,463,723
People per km²3,6191,768
Museums within 10 km5976
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre9189
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bangkok 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). 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.