VacationSelector

Beijing or Sydney?

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.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
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.

BeijingSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 60 points.60
BeijingSydney
Score060
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km0160
Coast distance145 km7 km
Water distance7 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 12 points.12
BeijingSydney
Score6351
Museums within 10 km9544
Museums within 2 km of centre1520
Share of museums within 2 km %1645
Unesco sites within 50 km62
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 23 points.23
BeijingSydney
Score3558
Protected land share 50 km %310
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10052
Park area within 2 km143 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 13 points.13
BeijingSydney
Score7764
Tourist attractions within 2 km4137
Park area within 2 km143 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km122
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 10 points.10
BeijingSydney
Score5060
Notable places within 2 km69123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 29 points.29
BeijingSydney
Score7950
Price level global4990.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 15 points.15
BeijingSydney
Score6681
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm55 mm to 121 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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingSydney
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
9 h 55 m
€539-575
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 50 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 25 m
€217-253
PKX · 45 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
7 h 0 m
no fares
PKX · 45 km
6 h 5 m
€460-617
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
7 h 55 m
€595-787
3 stops
PKX · 45 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 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

MeasureBeijingSydney
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 m6 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingSydney
City population21,893,0955,450,496
People per km²1,334449
Museums within 10 km8338
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km62
Distinct cuisines in the centre2979
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months

Where else could you go?

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