VacationSelector

Bangkok or Rio de Janeiro?

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 places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

BangkokRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 60 points.60
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score40100
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km061
Coast distance23 km1 km
Water distance23 km1 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 29 points.29
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score8354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,957804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2616
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 23 points.23
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score4669
Museums within 10 km103110
Museums within 2 km of centre3051
Share of museums within 2 km %2946
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 26 points.26
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score8357
Drinking venues within 4 km3,383818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4162
Nightclubs within 4 km7250
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 11 points.11
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score5162
Protected land share 50 km %21
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %8357
Park area within 2 km42 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 2 points.2
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score5759
Tourist attractions within 2 km3130
Park area within 2 km42 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 8 points.8
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score4856
Notable places within 2 km6298
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 12 points.12
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score9381
Price level global29.746.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 29 points.29
BangkokRio de Janeiro
Score5685
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm42 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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
Rio de Janeiro
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). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokRio de Janeiro
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 15 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
12 h 40 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 45 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 5 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 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

MeasureBangkokRio de Janeiro
Official languageThaiPortuguese
CurrencyBaht (THB)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC-3
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation2 m31 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokRio de Janeiro
City population5,676,6486,211,223
People per km²3,6194,930
Museums within 10 km5970
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre9127
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bangkok or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.