VacationSelector

Beijing or Manchester?

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 good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Manchester
47
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.

BeijingManchester
Beaches & swimming. Manchester leads by 28 points.28
BeijingManchester
Score028
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km010
Coast distance145 km27 km
Water distance27 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 21 points.21
BeijingManchester
Score6342
Museums within 10 km9523
Museums within 2 km of centre1511
Share of museums within 2 km %1648
Unesco sites within 50 km62
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Manchester leads by 1 points.1
BeijingManchester
Score3536
Protected land share 50 km %317
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %10099
Park area within 2 km143 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 45 points.45
BeijingManchester
Score7732
Tourist attractions within 2 km415
Park area within 2 km143 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km122
Sights concentration. Beijing leads by 2 points.2
BeijingManchester
Score5048
Notable places within 2 km6961
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 25 points.25
BeijingManchester
Score7954
Price level global4984.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 12 points.12
BeijingManchester
Score6654
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm51 mm to 95 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
Manchester
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Manchester
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Manchester
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Manchester
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Manchester
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
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). Manchester: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (14.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingManchester
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
OsloOSL, TRF
8 h 55 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 0 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
10 h 10 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
CopenhagenCPH
9 h 10 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
GenevaGVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
4 h 30 m
€173-234
1 stop
PKX · 45 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 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

MeasureBeijingManchester
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 m38 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsManchester Airport (MAN)15 km from centre210 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingManchester
City population21,893,095547,627
People per km²1,3344,737
Museums within 10 km8328
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km62
Distinct cuisines in the centre2963
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 Manchester 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.