VacationSelector

Bangkok or Sydney?

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.

Sydney
64
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.

BangkokSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 20 points.20
BangkokSydney
Score4060
Swim season months126
Beaches 10 km0160
Coast distance23 km7 km
Water distance23 km7 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 5 points.5
BangkokSydney
Score8378
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,9572,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2631
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 5 points.5
BangkokSydney
Score4651
Museums within 10 km10344
Museums within 2 km of centre3020
Share of museums within 2 km %2945
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 8 points.8
BangkokSydney
Score8375
Drinking venues within 4 km3,3832,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,3961,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4169
Nightclubs within 4 km72120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 7 points.7
BangkokSydney
Score5158
Protected land share 50 km %10
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8352
Park area within 2 km42 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 7 points.7
BangkokSydney
Score5764
Tourist attractions within 2 km3137
Park area within 2 km42 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 12 points.12
BangkokSydney
Score4860
Notable places within 2 km62123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 43 points.43
BangkokSydney
Score9350
Price level global29.790.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 25 points.25
BangkokSydney
Score5681
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm55 mm to 121 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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokSydney
TokyoHND, NRT
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 km
SeoulICN, GMP
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
4 h 10 m
€265-290
DMK · 21 km
6 h 5 m
€460-617
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
1 h 30 m
€127-140
BKK · 26 km
8 h 45 m
€404-717
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
4 h 5 m
€176-184
BKK · 26 km
9 h 55 m
€539-575
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
6 h 55 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 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

MeasureBangkokSydney
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 m6 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokSydney
City population5,676,6485,450,496
People per km²3,619449
Museums within 10 km5938
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre9179
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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