VacationSelector

Belfast or Bologna?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Belfast
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Bologna
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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.

BelfastBologna
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BelfastBologna
Score480
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km102
Coast distance1 km74 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Bologna leads by 2 points.2
BelfastBologna
Score5658
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432822
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3120
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 38 points.38
BelfastBologna
Score2967
Museums within 10 km1858
Museums within 2 km of centre643
Share of museums within 2 km %3374
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Bologna leads by 5 points.5
BelfastBologna
Score4853
Drinking venues within 4 km550720
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348531
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6374
Nightclubs within 4 km2930
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 14 points.14
BelfastBologna
Score5339
Protected land share 50 km %197
Landscape blanket share 50 km %131
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares119 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 7 points.7
BelfastBologna
Score4855
Tourist attractions within 2 km1632
Park area within 2 km68 hectares119 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 18 points.18
BelfastBologna
Score4260
Notable places within 2 km43120
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bologna leads by 14 points.14
BelfastBologna
Score5468
Price level global84.964.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Bologna leads by 16 points.16
BelfastBologna
Score5167
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C7 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm34 mm to 75 mm
Dry months05
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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Bologna
7
10
15
19
24
29
32
32
26
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre). Bologna: 1991-2020 normals, Bologna / Borgo Panigale (5.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastBologna
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
CataniaCTA
3 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 40 m
€41-45
BLQ · 6 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 35 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 40 m
€42-75
BLQ · 6 km
TiranaTIA
3 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 35 m
€96-199
BLQ · 6 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
PSA · 118 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
VRN · 106 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

MeasureBelfastBologna
Official languageEnglishItalian
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation3 m54 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastBologna
City population345,006387,971
People per km²3,0002,754
Museums within 10 km866
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre4462
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Belfast or Bologna 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.