VacationSelector

Bangkok or London?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Bangkok
62
match

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

London
64
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

BangkokLondon
Beaches & swimming. Bangkok leads by 40 points.40
BangkokLondon
Score400
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km047
Coast distance23 km43 km
Water distance23 km
Places to eat. London leads by 5 points.5
BangkokLondon
Score8388
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9573,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2640
Museums & heritage. London leads by 26 points.26
BangkokLondon
Score4672
Museums within 10 km103148
Museums within 2 km of centre3049
Share of museums within 2 km %2933
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. London leads by 12 points.12
BangkokLondon
Score8395
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3835,327
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3962,443
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4146
Nightclubs within 4 km72312
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 11 points.11
BangkokLondon
Score5140
Protected land share 50 km %16
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %8397
Park area within 2 km42 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 18 points.18
BangkokLondon
Score5775
Tourist attractions within 2 km3185
Park area within 2 km42 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. London leads by 41 points.41
BangkokLondon
Score4889
Notable places within 2 km62649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 39 points.39
BangkokLondon
Score9354
Price level global29.784.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. London leads by 7 points.7
BangkokLondon
Score5663
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm38 mm to 67 mm
Dry months31
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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
London
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokLondon
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
4 h 5 m
€176-184
BKK · 26 km
11 h 30 m
€665-831
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
GuangzhouCAN
2 h 40 m
€144-163
BKK · 26 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
1 h 30 m
€127-140
BKK · 26 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 55 m
€168-200
BKK · 26 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
PhuketHKT
1 h 30 m
€56-63
BKK · 26 km
12 h 20 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 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

MeasureBangkokLondon
Official languageThaiEnglish
CurrencyBaht (THB)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+7UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199112 or 999
Elevation2 m4 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokLondon
City population5,676,6488,799,728
People per km²3,6195,598
Museums within 10 km59215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre91116
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

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