VacationSelector

Bath or Chicago?

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 value for money and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Chicago
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration 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.

BathChicago
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 45 points.45
BathChicago
Score853
Swim season months01
Beaches 10 km112
Coast distance29 km10,000 km
Water distance29 km1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 35 points.35
BathChicago
Score4681
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2452,147
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2637
Museums & heritage. Bath leads by 1 points.1
BathChicago
Score4746
Museums within 10 km2045
Museums within 2 km of centre1420
Share of museums within 2 km %7044
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 26 points.26
BathChicago
Score3662
Drinking venues within 4 km3201,123
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre240728
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7565
Nightclubs within 4 km1151
Nature & day trips. Bath leads by 6 points.6
BathChicago
Score4438
Protected land share 50 km %286
Landscape blanket share 50 km %270
Land share of disc %92100
Park area within 2 km45 hectares118 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 15 points.15
BathChicago
Score4055
Tourist attractions within 2 km1418
Park area within 2 km45 hectares118 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 38 points.38
BathChicago
Score3270
Notable places within 2 km25217
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bath leads by 11 points.11
BathChicago
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Chicago leads by 2 points.2
BathChicago
Score5557
Monthly daytime high6.8 °C to 21.4 °C0.2 °C to 29.4 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm54 mm to 121 mm
Dry months00
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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Sea temperature, °C
Bath
8
7
7
9
12
15
18
18
17
15
12
9
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Rainfall, mm
Bath
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Daylight, hours per day
Bath
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bath
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Chicago
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bath: 1991-2020 normals, Lyneham (29.2 km from centre). Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBathChicago
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 132 km
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
8 h 15 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 68 km
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
BostonBOS, PSM
6 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
Abu DhabiAUH
7 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 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

MeasureBathChicago
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation132 m179 m
Main airportBristol Airport (BRS)25 km from centre116 non-stop destinationsChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBathChicago
City population94,0922,746,388
People per km²3,2454,529
Museums within 10 km1743
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3887
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone1 month

Where else could you go?

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