VacationSelector

Beijing or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Beijing
53
match

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

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

BeijingCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
BeijingCape Town
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km029
Coast distance145 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 9 points.9
BeijingCape Town
Score6354
Museums within 10 km9525
Museums within 2 km of centre1520
Share of museums within 2 km %1680
Unesco sites within 50 km63
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
BeijingCape Town
Score3536
Protected land share 50 km %36
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10042
Park area within 2 km143 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 41 points.41
BeijingCape Town
Score7736
Tourist attractions within 2 km4119
Park area within 2 km143 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km120
Sights concentration. Beijing leads by 5 points.5
BeijingCape Town
Score5045
Notable places within 2 km6951
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
BeijingCape Town
Score7985
Price level global4940.5
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
BeijingCape Town
Score6686
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months86
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
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
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. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 0 m
€475-645
PEK · 25 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 50 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
21 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
MunichMUC
9 h 45 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
9 h 55 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
13 h 45 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
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

MeasureBeijingCape Town
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+2
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112
Elevation43 m5 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingCape Town
City population21,893,0953,776,313
People per km²1,3341,538
Museums within 10 km8322
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km63
Distinct cuisines in the centre2965
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 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. 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.