VacationSelector

Bath or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Bath
40
match

Wins on nature & day trips and good for families with your weighting.

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money 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.

BathCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 52 points.52
BathCape Town
Score860
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km129
Coast distance29 km1 km
Water distance29 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 21 points.21
BathCape Town
Score4667
Restaurants within 2 km of centre245650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2642
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 7 points.7
BathCape Town
Score4754
Museums within 10 km2025
Museums within 2 km of centre1420
Share of museums within 2 km %7080
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
BathCape Town
Score3647
Drinking venues within 4 km320483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre240389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7581
Nightclubs within 4 km1147
Nature & day trips. Bath leads by 8 points.8
BathCape Town
Score4436
Protected land share 50 km %286
Landscape blanket share 50 km %270
Land share of disc %9242
Park area within 2 km45 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Bath leads by 4 points.4
BathCape Town
Score4036
Tourist attractions within 2 km1419
Park area within 2 km45 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
BathCape Town
Score3245
Notable places within 2 km2551
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
BathCape Town
Score5485
Price level global84.940.5
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
BathCape Town
Score5586
Monthly daytime high6.8 °C to 21.4 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months06
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
Bath
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
21
18
14
10
7
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Bath
8
7
7
9
12
15
18
18
17
15
12
9
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Bath
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Bath
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Bath
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bath: 1991-2020 normals, Lyneham (29.2 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBathCape Town
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
11 h 20 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 15 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHX · 126 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
11 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
13 h 30 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
1 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
no fares
BHX · 126 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBathCape Town
Official languageEnglishEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation132 m5 m
Main airportBristol Airport (BRS)25 km from centre116 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBathCape Town
City population94,0923,776,313
People per km²3,2451,538
Museums within 10 km1722
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre3865
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bath or Cape Town 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. 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.