VacationSelector

Belfast or Ghent?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Belfast
48
match

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

Ghent
50
match

Wins on museums & heritage and places to eat 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.

BelfastGhent
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 22 points.22
BelfastGhent
Score4826
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km108
Coast distance1 km32 km
Water distance1 km32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 14 points.14
BelfastGhent
Score5670
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3149
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 29 points.29
BelfastGhent
Score2958
Museums within 10 km1824
Museums within 2 km of centre620
Share of museums within 2 km %3383
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Ghent leads by 1 points.1
BelfastGhent
Score4849
Drinking venues within 4 km550570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6378
Nightclubs within 4 km2926
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 19 points.19
BelfastGhent
Score5334
Protected land share 50 km %197
Landscape blanket share 50 km %134
Land share of disc %6587
Park area within 2 km68 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 2 points.2
BelfastGhent
Score4850
Tourist attractions within 2 km1619
Park area within 2 km68 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Ghent leads by 4 points.4
BelfastGhent
Score4246
Notable places within 2 km4355
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 6 points.6
BelfastGhent
Score5460
Price level global84.976.2
Daily budget—€180
Year-round weather. Ghent leads by 5 points.5
BelfastGhent
Score5156
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months01
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2

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). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastGhent
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 35 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
€66-101
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 0 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
CRL · 84 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 45 m
€179-232
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 56 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 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

MeasureBelfastGhent
Official languageEnglishFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation3 m12 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastGhent
City population345,006272,657
People per km²3,0001,728
Museums within 10 km830
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre4483
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Belfast or Ghent 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.