VacationSelector

Beijing or London?

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 value for money and year-round weather with your weighting.

London
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

BeijingLondon
Beaches & swimming. Beijing and London are level on 0.
BeijingLondon
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km047
Coast distance145 km43 km
Water distance——
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. London leads by 9 points.9
BeijingLondon
Score6372
Museums within 10 km95148
Museums within 2 km of centre1549
Share of museums within 2 km %1633
Unesco sites within 50 km64
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. London leads by 5 points.5
BeijingLondon
Score3540
Protected land share 50 km %316
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %10097
Park area within 2 km143 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 2 points.2
BeijingLondon
Score7775
Tourist attractions within 2 km4185
Park area within 2 km143 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km123
Sights concentration. London leads by 39 points.39
BeijingLondon
Score5089
Notable places within 2 km69649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 25 points.25
BeijingLondon
Score7954
Price level global4984.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 3 points.3
BeijingLondon
Score6663
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm38 mm to 67 mm
Dry months81
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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
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). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingLondon
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
11 h 30 m
€665-831
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 25 m
€217-253
PKX · 45 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ChongqingCKG, CQW
2 h 20 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ChangshaCSX
2 h 10 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
GenevaGVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€184-208
LHR · 23 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
21 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 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

MeasureBeijingLondon
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 m4 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingLondon
City population21,893,0958,799,728
People per km²1,3345,598
Museums within 10 km83215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km64
Distinct cuisines in the centre29116

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Beijing or London 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. 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.