VacationSelector

Bangkok or Melbourne?

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 value for money and nightlife with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
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.

BangkokMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
BangkokMelbourne
Score4055
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km019
Coast distance23 km4 km
Water distance23 km4 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 8 points.8
BangkokMelbourne
Score8375
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9571,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2629
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
BangkokMelbourne
Score4649
Museums within 10 km10342
Museums within 2 km of centre3024
Share of museums within 2 km %2957
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 9 points.9
BangkokMelbourne
Score8374
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3831,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3961,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4162
Nightclubs within 4 km72124
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 8 points.8
BangkokMelbourne
Score5143
Protected land share 50 km %—6
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8381
Park area within 2 km42 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
BangkokMelbourne
Score5760
Tourist attractions within 2 km3126
Park area within 2 km42 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 9 points.9
BangkokMelbourne
Score4857
Notable places within 2 km62103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 43 points.43
BangkokMelbourne
Score9350
Price level global29.790.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 20 points.20
BangkokMelbourne
Score5676
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm45 mm to 69 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
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. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokMelbourne
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
4 h 10 m
€265-290
DMK · 21 km
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
1 h 30 m
€127-140
BKK · 26 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
4 h 5 m
€176-184
BKK · 26 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
2 h 10 m
€161-171
DMK · 21 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
17 h 55 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

MeasureBangkokMelbourne
Official languageThaiEnglish
CurrencyBaht (THB)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199000
Elevation2 m31 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year–13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokMelbourne
City population5,676,6485,350,705
People per km²3,619535
Museums within 10 km5942
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre9186
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 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). 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.