VacationSelector

Bologna or Manchester?

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

Your match

Bologna
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Manchester
47
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BolognaManchester
Beaches & swimming. Manchester leads by 28 points.28
BolognaManchester
Score028
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km210
Coast distance74 km27 km
Water distance27 km
Places to eat. Manchester leads by 10 points.10
BolognaManchester
Score5868
Restaurants within 2 km of centre822853
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2035
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 25 points.25
BolognaManchester
Score6742
Museums within 10 km5823
Museums within 2 km of centre4311
Share of museums within 2 km %7448
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Manchester leads by 9 points.9
BolognaManchester
Score5362
Drinking venues within 4 km7201,029
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre531792
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7477
Nightclubs within 4 km3082
Nature & day trips. Bologna leads by 3 points.3
BolognaManchester
Score3936
Protected land share 50 km %717
Landscape blanket share 50 km %117
Land share of disc %10099
Park area within 2 km119 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 23 points.23
BolognaManchester
Score5532
Tourist attractions within 2 km325
Park area within 2 km119 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 12 points.12
BolognaManchester
Score6048
Notable places within 2 km12061
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bologna leads by 14 points.14
BolognaManchester
Score6854
Price level global64.984.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Bologna leads by 13 points.13
BolognaManchester
Score6754
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm51 mm to 95 mm
Dry months50
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
Bologna
7
10
15
19
24
29
32
32
26
19
13
8
Manchester
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Manchester
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Manchester
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Manchester
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3
Manchester
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bologna: 1991-2020 normals, Bologna / Borgo Panigale (5.5 km from centre). Manchester: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (14.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

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

MeasureBolognaManchester
Official languageItalianEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation54 m38 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsManchester Airport (MAN)15 km from centre210 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaManchester
City population387,971547,627
People per km²2,7544,737
Museums within 10 km6628
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6263
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bologna or Manchester 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.