VacationSelector

Bologna or Shanghai?

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

Bologna
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on good for families and beaches & swimming 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.

BolognaShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
BolognaShanghai
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km20
Coast distance74 km18 km
Water distance18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 22 points.22
BolognaShanghai
Score6745
Museums within 10 km58108
Museums within 2 km of centre4328
Share of museums within 2 km %7426
Unesco sites within 50 km30
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 3 points.3
BolognaShanghai
Score3942
Protected land share 50 km %79
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10082
Park area within 2 km119 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 26 points.26
BolognaShanghai
Score5581
Tourist attractions within 2 km3286
Park area within 2 km119 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km010
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 9 points.9
BolognaShanghai
Score6051
Notable places within 2 km12073
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 11 points.11
BolognaShanghai
Score6879
Price level global64.949
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Bologna leads by 2 points.2
BolognaShanghai
Score6765
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm43 mm to 216 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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBolognaShanghai
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 40 m
€42-75
BLQ · 6 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
MadridMAD
2 h 10 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 0 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 55 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureBolognaShanghai
Official languageItalianPutonghua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation54 m4 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaShanghai
City population387,97124,870,895
People per km²2,7543,922
Museums within 10 km6644
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6264
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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