VacationSelector

Bangkok or San Diego?

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.

San Diego
58
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.

BangkokSan Diego
Beaches & swimming. San Diego leads by 23 points.23
BangkokSan Diego
Score4063
Swim season months121
Beaches 10 km042
Coast distance23 km1 km
Water distance23 km1 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 20 points.20
BangkokSan Diego
Score8363
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,957823
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2627
Museums & heritage. Bangkok leads by 2 points.2
BangkokSan Diego
Score4644
Museums within 10 km10359
Museums within 2 km of centre3030
Share of museums within 2 km %2951
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 33 points.33
BangkokSan Diego
Score8350
Drinking venues within 4 km3,383615
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396408
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4166
Nightclubs within 4 km7231
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 4 points.4
BangkokSan Diego
Score5155
Protected land share 50 km %6
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8352
Park area within 2 km42 hectares308 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 18 points.18
BangkokSan Diego
Score5775
Tourist attractions within 2 km3140
Park area within 2 km42 hectares308 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. Bangkok leads by 8 points.8
BangkokSan Diego
Score4840
Notable places within 2 km6240
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 50 points.50
BangkokSan Diego
Score9343
Price level global29.7100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 32 points.32
BangkokSan Diego
Score5688
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C18.6 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm0 mm to 56 mm
Dry months39
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
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
San Diego
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). San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokSan Diego
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
50 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
14 h 35 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
MunichMUC
11 h 0 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 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

MeasureBangkokSan Diego
Official languageThai
CurrencyBaht (THB)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199911
Elevation2 m129 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokSan Diego
City population5,676,6481,386,932
People per km²3,6191,438
Museums within 10 km5926
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre9144
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months1 month

Where else could you go?

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