VacationSelector

Beijing or Kyoto?

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 nature & day trips and good for families with your weighting.

Kyoto
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage 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.

BeijingKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
BeijingKyoto
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance145 km47 km
Water distance47 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 9 points.9
BeijingKyoto
Score6372
Museums within 10 km95132
Museums within 2 km of centre1551
Share of museums within 2 km %1639
Unesco sites within 50 km64
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Beijing leads by 13 points.13
BeijingKyoto
Score3522
Protected land share 50 km %32
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km143 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 11 points.11
BeijingKyoto
Score7766
Tourist attractions within 2 km4162
Park area within 2 km143 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km124
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 2 points.2
BeijingKyoto
Score5052
Notable places within 2 km6979
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 9 points.9
BeijingKyoto
Score7970
Price level global4962.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 4 points.4
BeijingKyoto
Score6662
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm40 mm to 232 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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingKyoto
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
4 h 30 m
€173-234
1 stop
PKX · 45 km
5 h 35 m
€288-317
KIX · 81 km
HangzhouHGH
1 h 55 m
€151-193
PKX · 45 km
2 h 25 m
€360-370
KIX · 81 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 50 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
6 h 25 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
13 h 10 m
no fares
KIX · 81 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

MeasureBeijingKyoto
Official languagePutonghuaJapanese
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Yen (JPY)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+9
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119Police 110, fire 119
Elevation43 m51 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingKyoto
City population21,893,0951,463,723
People per km²1,3341,768
Museums within 10 km8376
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km64
Distinct cuisines in the centre2989
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Beijing or Kyoto 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.