VacationSelector

Bangkok or Lucerne?

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 value for money and nightlife with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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.

BangkokLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Bangkok leads by 40 points.40
BangkokLucerne
Score400
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km016
Coast distance23 km669 km
Water distance23 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 36 points.36
BangkokLucerne
Score8347
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,957269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2625
Museums & heritage. Bangkok leads by 6 points.6
BangkokLucerne
Score4640
Museums within 10 km10323
Museums within 2 km of centre3013
Share of museums within 2 km %2957
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 55 points.55
BangkokLucerne
Score8328
Drinking venues within 4 km3,383202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4175
Nightclubs within 4 km7211
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 26 points.26
BangkokLucerne
Score5125
Protected land share 50 km %7
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %83100
Park area within 2 km42 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Bangkok leads by 19 points.19
BangkokLucerne
Score5738
Tourist attractions within 2 km3115
Park area within 2 km42 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Bangkok leads by 13 points.13
BangkokLucerne
Score4835
Notable places within 2 km6229
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 58 points.58
BangkokLucerne
Score9335
Price level global29.7110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Bangkok leads by 3 points.3
BangkokLucerne
Score5653
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm60 mm to 128 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
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
Lucerne
2
3
5
6
6
7
7
7
5
3
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokLucerne
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 49 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
2 h 45 m
€110-133
ZRH · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
1 h 25 m
€234-276
ZRH · 49 km
MadridMAD
12 h 40 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
2 h 5 m
€158-220
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 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

MeasureBangkokLucerne
Official languageThaiFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyBaht (THB)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199112
Elevation2 m436 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokLucerne
City population5,676,64886,234
People per km²3,6192,963
Museums within 10 km5914
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre9146
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 Lucerne 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.