VacationSelector

Bath or Dublin?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Dublin
✓ Best match
55
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.

The verdict

Choose Bath if you want a small city with countryside close by, protected land in most directions and 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and you don't mind quieter evenings.

Choose Dublin if you want the sea 3km from the centre, a compact core with far more notable places on foot, a wider choice of restaurants and considerably more bars and clubs.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

BathDublin
Beaches & swimming. Dublin leads by 41 points.41
BathDublin
Score849
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km111
Coast distance29 km3 km
Water distance29 km3 km
Places to eat. Dublin leads by 24 points.24
BathDublin
Score4670
Restaurants within 2 km of centre245920
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2637
Museums & heritage. Dublin leads by 8 points.8
BathDublin
Score4755
Museums within 10 km2047
Museums within 2 km of centre1437
Share of museums within 2 km %7079
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Dublin leads by 28 points.28
BathDublin
Score3664
Drinking venues within 4 km3201,239
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre240934
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7575
Nightclubs within 4 km1140
Nature & day trips. Bath leads by 18 points.18
BathDublin
Score4426
Protected land share 50 km %283
Landscape blanket share 50 km %270
Land share of disc %9262
Park area within 2 km45 hectares43 hectares
Good for families. Dublin leads by 14 points.14
BathDublin
Score4054
Tourist attractions within 2 km1441
Park area within 2 km45 hectares43 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Dublin leads by 30 points.30
BathDublin
Score3262
Notable places within 2 km25141
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dublin leads by 3 points.3
BathDublin
Score5457
Price level global84.980.2
Daily budget—€187
Year-round weather. Bath leads by 1 points.1
BathDublin
Score5554
Monthly daytime high6.8 °C to 21.4 °C8.2 °C to 19.5 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm52 mm to 83 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

Where they differ

Bath sits in open country: 28% of the land around it is protected against 3% around Dublin, which makes trips out of town the point rather than a filler day. It also has 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Dublin's 1.

Dublin puts the sea 3km from its centre against 29km for Bath, and has 11 beaches nearby. Its centre holds many times as many notable places within walking distance, about three times as many restaurants, and roughly three times as many bars and clubs.

Where they are alike

Neither city gets extremes. Bath runs 7-21°C across the year against Dublin's 8-20°C, so both give mild summers and cool rather than cold winters. Neither has a month at 40mm of rain or less, so waterproofs travel with you whatever the season.

Both hold a similar amount of park space near the centre, and each has 1 theme park within reach. On heritage they are close too: Dublin has more museums, Bath more UNESCO listing nearby.

Which traveller are you?

Beach-minded travellers, or anyone who wants a swim within reach of the hotel: Dublin, with the sea 3km from the centre and 11 beaches nearby. Neither city gives warm water, so treat it as a coastal walk with an optional dip.

Walkers and day-trippers: Bath. 28% of the surrounding land is protected and 2 UNESCO-listed places sit within day-trip reach, so the trip is built around leaving town rather than staying in it.

Eating and going out: Dublin, with about three times as many restaurants near the centre, a somewhat wider range of kitchens and roughly three times as many bars and clubs, most of them walkable.

What the numbers don't tell you

No cost comparison is possible here. The dataset carries a daily budget for Dublin and none for Bath, so nothing in these figures tells you which trip is cheaper. The value standing of the two rests on a different measure that both cities have, and it is not a statement about prices.

Dublin's beach advantage is about access rather than conditions: the sea tops out at 15°C, and Bath's single beach is 29km from town, so swimming is a question of tolerance either way. No month in either city falls to 40mm of rain or less, so the warmest months are not the driest ones.

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
Dublin
8
9
10
12
15
18
20
19
17
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Bath
8
7
7
9
12
15
18
18
17
15
12
9
Dublin
9
8
8
9
11
13
15
15
15
13
12
11
Rainfall, mm
Bath
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Dublin
62
52
52
55
58
65
62
74
61
78
83
72
Daylight, hours per day
Bath
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Dublin
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bath
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Dublin
2
3
4
5
6
6
5
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bath: 1991-2020 normals, Lyneham (29.2 km from centre). Dublin: 1991-2020 normals, Dublin Airport (9.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Bath peaks in July and August, when highs reach 21°C and rain sits near 61-66mm. May and June are cooler but no wetter, and they suit the countryside around the city best.

Dublin holds up better at the cold end of the year: January rain is nearer 62mm than Bath's 77mm, with highs around 8°C in both. Its summer runs slightly cooler at 20°C, and late summer turns wetter than the start of it.

Getting there

Flying fromBathDublin
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 15 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€80-139
DUB · 9 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 35 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
ArrecifeACE
3 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
FaroFAO
2 h 35 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€43-47
DUB · 9 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 68 km
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 126 km
7 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 15 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
CancunCUN
9 h 55 m
no fares
BHX · 126 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 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

MeasureBathDublin
Official languageEnglishEnglish, Irish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation132 m20 m
Main airportBristol Airport (BRS)25 km from centre116 non-stop destinationsDublin Airport (DUB)9 km from centre201 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBathDublin
City population94,092592,713
People per km²3,2455,154
Museums within 10 km1740
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3874
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 Dublin 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.