VacationSelector

Beijing or Vancouver?

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 museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Vancouver
✓ Best match
57
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.

BeijingVancouver
Beaches & swimming. Vancouver leads by 60 points.60
BeijingVancouver
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km0109
Coast distance145 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 29 points.29
BeijingVancouver
Score6334
Museums within 10 km9527
Museums within 2 km of centre1515
Share of museums within 2 km %1656
Unesco sites within 50 km60
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Vancouver leads by 42 points.42
BeijingVancouver
Score3577
Protected land share 50 km %319
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10060
Park area within 2 km143 hectares103 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 24 points.24
BeijingVancouver
Score7753
Tourist attractions within 2 km4115
Park area within 2 km143 hectares103 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km123
Sights concentration. Beijing leads by 2 points.2
BeijingVancouver
Score5048
Notable places within 2 km6963
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Beijing leads by 25 points.25
BeijingVancouver
Score7954
Price level global4984
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 13 points.13
BeijingVancouver
Score6653
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C7.3 °C to 23 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm42 mm to 245 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
Vancouver
7
8
11
14
18
20
23
23
19
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Beijing
No coastline within reach
Vancouver
7
7
8
10
12
14
16
16
14
11
9
8
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Vancouver
237
121
164
114
73
65
42
49
71
155
245
196
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Vancouver
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Vancouver
2
3
4
6
8
7
10
9
7
4
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). Vancouver: 1991-2020 normals, Vancouver Harbour CS (4.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingVancouver
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 45 m
€180-197
PKX · 45 km
10 h 20 m
€629-762
1 stop
YVR · 9 km
TokyoHND, NRT
3 h 10 m
€312-367
PEK · 25 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 55 m
€151-190
PKX · 45 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 30 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 45 m
€147-217
1 stop
YVR · 9 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 55 m
€144-160
PKX · 45 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 25 m
€217-253
PKX · 45 km
12 h 25 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 5 m
€1,020-1172
2 stops
PEK · 25 km
4 h 35 m
€210-223
1 stop
YVR · 9 km
San FranciscoSFO
11 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
15 h 20 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
10 h 10 m
€743-810
1 stop
YVR · 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

MeasureBeijingVancouver
Official languagePutonghuaFrench, English
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
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 m2 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsVancouver International Airport (YVR)9 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingVancouver
City population21,893,095662,248
People per km²1,3345,759
Museums within 10 km8326
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km60
Distinct cuisines in the centre2985
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 Vancouver 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.