VacationSelector

Beijing or Belfast?

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

Your match

Beijing
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Belfast
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

BeijingBelfast
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BeijingBelfast
Score048
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km010
Coast distance145 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 34 points.34
BeijingBelfast
Score6329
Museums within 10 km9518
Museums within 2 km of centre156
Share of museums within 2 km %1633
Unesco sites within 50 km61
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 18 points.18
BeijingBelfast
Score3553
Protected land share 50 km %319
Landscape blanket share 50 km %013
Land share of disc %10065
Park area within 2 km143 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 29 points.29
BeijingBelfast
Score7748
Tourist attractions within 2 km4116
Park area within 2 km143 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km122
Sights concentration. Beijing leads by 8 points.8
BeijingBelfast
Score5042
Notable places within 2 km6943
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 25 points.25
BeijingBelfast
Score7954
Price level global4984.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 15 points.15
BeijingBelfast
Score6651
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C6.9 °C to 19 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm55 mm to 89 mm
Dry months80
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
Beijing
2
6
13
21
27
31
32
31
27
19
10
4
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingBelfast
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
EdinburghEDI
10 h 0 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
55 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
9 h 55 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 0 m
€475-645
PEK · 25 km
4 h 5 m
€183-239
DUB · 132 km
ViennaVIE
9 h 25 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
PraguePRG
9 h 25 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 132 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

MeasureBeijingBelfast
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112 or 999
Elevation43 m3 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingBelfast
City population21,893,095345,006
People per km²1,3343,000
Museums within 10 km838
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre2944
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Beijing or Belfast 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.