VacationSelector

Beijing or Los Angeles?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Beijing
53
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
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.

BeijingLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Los Angeles leads by 29 points.29
BeijingLos Angeles
Score029
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance145 km
Water distance
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 14 points.14
BeijingLos Angeles
Score6349
Museums within 10 km9569
Museums within 2 km of centre1523
Share of museums within 2 km %1633
Unesco sites within 50 km61
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 27 points.27
BeijingLos Angeles
Score3562
Protected land share 50 km %326
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km143 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 44 points.44
BeijingLos Angeles
Score7733
Tourist attractions within 2 km4111
Park area within 2 km143 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km122
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 4 points.4
BeijingLos Angeles
Score5054
Notable places within 2 km6988
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 36 points.36
BeijingLos Angeles
Score7943
Price level global49100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 21 points.21
BeijingLos Angeles
Score6687
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months88
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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingLos Angeles
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
11 h 0 m
€785-892
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
11 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 25 m
€217-253
PKX · 45 km
14 h 15 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
12 h 0 m
€570-646
LAX · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
10 h 55 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
15 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
16 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 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

MeasureBeijingLos Angeles
Official languagePutonghua
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119911
Elevation43 m106 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingLos Angeles
City population21,893,0953,898,747
People per km²1,3342,994
Museums within 10 km8338
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre2946
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 Los Angeles 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.