VacationSelector

Beijing or Melbourne?

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 good for families with your weighting.

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
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.

BeijingMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
BeijingMelbourne
Score055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km019
Coast distance145 km4 km
Water distance4 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 14 points.14
BeijingMelbourne
Score6349
Museums within 10 km9542
Museums within 2 km of centre1524
Share of museums within 2 km %1657
Unesco sites within 50 km61
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 8 points.8
BeijingMelbourne
Score3543
Protected land share 50 km %36
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10081
Park area within 2 km143 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 17 points.17
BeijingMelbourne
Score7760
Tourist attractions within 2 km4126
Park area within 2 km143 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km121
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
BeijingMelbourne
Score5057
Notable places within 2 km69103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 29 points.29
BeijingMelbourne
Score7950
Price level global4990.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
BeijingMelbourne
Score6676
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm45 mm to 69 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingMelbourne
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 50 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
7 h 0 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 25 m
€217-253
PKX · 45 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
4 h 30 m
€173-234
1 stop
PKX · 45 km
9 h 15 m
€407-480
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 0 m
€475-645
PEK · 25 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 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 2026-08 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

MeasureBeijingMelbourne
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119000
Elevation43 m31 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingMelbourne
City population21,893,0955,350,705
People per km²1,334535
Museums within 10 km8342
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre2986
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 Melbourne 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.