VacationSelector

Bangkok or San Francisco?

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, level with your weighting

Bangkok
62
match

Wins on value for money and nightlife with your weighting.

San Francisco
62
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 Francisco
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 20 points.20
BangkokSan Francisco
Score4060
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km044
Coast distance23 km2 km
Water distance23 km2 km
Places to eat. Bangkok and San Francisco are level on 83.
BangkokSan Francisco
Score8383
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9572,359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2639
Museums & heritage. Bangkok leads by 2 points.2
BangkokSan Francisco
Score4644
Museums within 10 km10357
Museums within 2 km of centre3029
Share of museums within 2 km %2951
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 15 points.15
BangkokSan Francisco
Score8368
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3831,434
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396928
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4165
Nightclubs within 4 km7297
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 9 points.9
BangkokSan Francisco
Score5160
Protected land share 50 km %17
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %8357
Park area within 2 km42 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Bangkok and San Francisco are level on 57.
BangkokSan Francisco
Score5757
Tourist attractions within 2 km3148
Park area within 2 km42 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 15 points.15
BangkokSan Francisco
Score4863
Notable places within 2 km62147
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 50 points.50
BangkokSan Francisco
Score9343
Price level global29.7100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 22 points.22
BangkokSan Francisco
Score5678
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C14 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm0 mm to 105 mm
Dry months37
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 Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
San Francisco
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 Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokSan Francisco
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
14 h 35 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
4 h 5 m
€176-184
BKK · 26 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
GuangzhouCAN
2 h 40 m
€144-163
BKK · 26 km
13 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
1 h 30 m
€127-140
BKK · 26 km
15 h 30 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 15 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€409-425
DMK · 21 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 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 Francisco
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 m16 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokSan Francisco
City population5,676,648873,965
People per km²3,6191,455
Museums within 10 km5950
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre91108
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 San Francisco 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.