VacationSelector

Bangkok or New York?

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

Your match

Bangkok
62
match

Wins on value for money and nature & day trips with your weighting.

New York
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

BangkokNew York
Beaches & swimming. New York leads by 24 points.24
BangkokNew York
Score4064
Swim season months123
Beaches 10 km017
Coast distance23 km1 km
Water distance23 km1 km
Places to eat. New York leads by 12 points.12
BangkokNew York
Score8395
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9576,032
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2638
Museums & heritage. New York leads by 14 points.14
BangkokNew York
Score4660
Museums within 10 km103119
Museums within 2 km of centre3031
Share of museums within 2 km %2926
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. New York leads by 6 points.6
BangkokNew York
Score8389
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3834,159
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3962,015
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4148
Nightclubs within 4 km72192
Nature & day trips. Bangkok leads by 12 points.12
BangkokNew York
Score5139
Protected land share 50 km %4
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8369
Park area within 2 km42 hectares134 hectares
Good for families. New York leads by 15 points.15
BangkokNew York
Score5772
Tourist attractions within 2 km3137
Park area within 2 km42 hectares134 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km47
Sights concentration. New York leads by 26 points.26
BangkokNew York
Score4874
Notable places within 2 km62268
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 50 points.50
BangkokNew York
Score9343
Price level global29.7100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. New York leads by 2 points.2
BangkokNew York
Score5658
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C4.5 °C to 30.1 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm74 mm to 112 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
New York
5
6
10
16
22
27
30
29
25
19
13
7
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
New York
6
4
5
8
13
18
22
23
21
17
13
9
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
New York
83
74
102
97
91
103
107
112
98
97
80
104
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
New York
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
New York
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). New York: 1991-2020 normals, LaGuardia Airport (12.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokNew York
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
13 h 30 m
€989-1136
JFK · 21 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
7 h 10 m
€459-498
JFK · 21 km
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
15 h 55 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
5 h 20 m
€314-354
1 stop
JFK · 21 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 45 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
7 h 30 m
€445-517
JFK · 21 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
4 h 35 m
€178-179
BKK · 26 km
13 h 35 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
New DelhiDEL
4 h 10 m
€267-290
BKK · 26 km
14 h 30 m
no fares
EWR · 14 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
18 h 45 m
no fares
EWR · 14 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
8 h 50 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 25 m
€622-836
1 stop
JFK · 21 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

MeasureBangkokNew York
Official languageThai
CurrencyBaht (THB)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199911
Elevation2 m25 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsJohn F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)21 km from centre188 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokNew York
City population5,676,6488,804,190
People per km²3,6197,256
Museums within 10 km59157
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre91132
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months3 months

Where else could you go?

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