VacationSelector

Bath or Ghent?

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 with your weighting.

Ghent
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

The verdict

Choose Bath if the countryside is the point: 28% of the surrounding land is protected, and the walking and day-trip country around it is the one thing it clearly does better.

Choose Ghent if you want the city itself to carry the trip: far more restaurants and kitchens near the centre, twice as many notable places within walking distance, and more to drink and dance to after dark.

Scoreboard

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

BathGhent
Beaches & swimming. Ghent leads by 18 points.18
BathGhent
Score826
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km18
Coast distance29 km32 km
Water distance29 km32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 24 points.24
BathGhent
Score4670
Restaurants within 2 km of centre245764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2649
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 11 points.11
BathGhent
Score4758
Museums within 10 km2024
Museums within 2 km of centre1420
Share of museums within 2 km %7083
Unesco sites within 50 km25
Nightlife. Ghent leads by 13 points.13
BathGhent
Score3649
Drinking venues within 4 km320570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre240446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7578
Nightclubs within 4 km1126
Nature & day trips. Bath leads by 10 points.10
BathGhent
Score4434
Protected land share 50 km %287
Landscape blanket share 50 km %274
Land share of disc %9287
Park area within 2 km45 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 10 points.10
BathGhent
Score4050
Tourist attractions within 2 km1419
Park area within 2 km45 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Ghent leads by 14 points.14
BathGhent
Score3246
Notable places within 2 km2555
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 6 points.6
BathGhent
Score5460
Price level global84.976.2
Daily budget—€180
Year-round weather. Ghent leads by 1 points.1
BathGhent
Score5556
Monthly daytime high6.8 °C to 21.4 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Bath's advantage is what surrounds it. 28% of the land around it is protected against 7% around Ghent, which shows up as open country within day-trip reach rather than as parkland in the centre, where Ghent has more.

Ghent has roughly three times as many restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens, and about twice as many notable places within walking distance, so days need less planning. It also has 8 beaches nearby against Bath's 1, though the sea sits 32km out.

Where they are alike

The two years run almost in parallel: daytime highs of about 7-21°C across the year in both, January cold rather than freezing and high summer warm rather than hot. Neither has a dry season; rain falls in every month.

They are close on family days out and on heritage too: each has 1 theme park within reach, museums in and near the centre, and UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach.

Which traveller are you?

Anyone planning the trip around eating and evenings out should take Ghent: about three times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, and roughly twice as many bars and clubs, most of them central.

Walkers who want to get out of town should take Bath: 28% of the surrounding land is protected against 7% around Ghent, so open country starts much closer to the door.

Families with a fixed week are better served in Ghent, which has somewhat more attractions near the centre and more park space in town, with short distances between them; both have 1 theme park within reach.

What the numbers don't tell you

No cost comparison is possible here. The dataset carries a daily budget for Ghent but none at all for Bath, so nothing in these figures tells you which trip is dearer; the value ratings rest on a different measure that both cities have, not on what a day costs.

Ghent's beach lead reads larger than it feels: 8 beaches against 1, but the sea is 32km from the centre and neither city has a month with water at 21°C or warmer. Read the warm months the same way, since Ghent's hottest weeks are also among its wettest.

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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Bath
8
7
7
9
12
15
18
18
17
15
12
9
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Bath
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Bath
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bath
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bath: 1991-2020 normals, Lyneham (29.2 km from centre). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Bath is at its best from July to September, with midsummer highs of 21°C and 54-66mm of rain a month against Ghent's 72-79mm over the same stretch. That late-summer edge is the clearest reason to pick it.

Ghent suits spring better. April is its driest month at 35mm and highs climb to 20°C by June, while Bath stays wetter through all three months. Its warmest days come in August at 22°C, though that is also its wettest summer month.

Getting there

Flying fromBathGhent
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
3 h 45 m
€179-232
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 25 km
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 56 km
DublinDUB
1 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 25 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 132 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 126 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 15 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
11 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 132 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureBathGhent
Official languageEnglishFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation132 m12 m
Main airportBristol Airport (BRS)25 km from centre116 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBathGhent
City population94,092272,657
People per km²3,2451,728
Museums within 10 km1730
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km25
Distinct cuisines in the centre3883
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 Ghent 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.