VacationSelector

Beijing or San Francisco?

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.

San Francisco
✓ Best match
62
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.

BeijingSan Francisco
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 60 points.60
BeijingSan Francisco
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km044
Coast distance145 km2 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 19 points.19
BeijingSan Francisco
Score6344
Museums within 10 km9557
Museums within 2 km of centre1529
Share of museums within 2 km %1651
Unesco sites within 50 km60
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 25 points.25
BeijingSan Francisco
Score3560
Protected land share 50 km %317
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %10057
Park area within 2 km143 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 20 points.20
BeijingSan Francisco
Score7757
Tourist attractions within 2 km4148
Park area within 2 km143 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km121
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 13 points.13
BeijingSan Francisco
Score5063
Notable places within 2 km69147
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 36 points.36
BeijingSan Francisco
Score7943
Price level global49100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 12 points.12
BeijingSan Francisco
Score6678
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C14 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm0 mm to 105 mm
Dry months87
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
San Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
San Francisco
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). San Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingSan Francisco
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 18 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
10 h 40 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
15 h 55 m
no fares
SFO · 18 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

MeasureBeijingSan Francisco
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 m16 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingSan Francisco
City population21,893,095873,965
People per km²1,3341,455
Museums within 10 km8350
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km60
Distinct cuisines in the centre29108
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 San Francisco 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.