VacationSelector

Boston or Bruges?

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

Your match

Boston
✓ Best match
55
match

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

Bruges
44
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage 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.

BostonBruges
Beaches & swimming. Boston leads by 52 points.52
BostonBruges
Score608
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km681
Coast distance1 km14 km
Water distance1 km14 km
Places to eat. Boston leads by 16 points.16
BostonBruges
Score7357
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,452443
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3232
Museums & heritage. Bruges leads by 14 points.14
BostonBruges
Score4357
Museums within 10 km7930
Museums within 2 km of centre2724
Share of museums within 2 km %3480
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Boston leads by 24 points.24
BostonBruges
Score5834
Drinking venues within 4 km886292
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre513233
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5880
Nightclubs within 4 km438
Nature & day trips. Boston leads by 27 points.27
BostonBruges
Score5326
Protected land share 50 km %122
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7765
Park area within 2 km116 hectares59 hectares
Good for families. Bruges leads by 7 points.7
BostonBruges
Score5360
Tourist attractions within 2 km2852
Park area within 2 km116 hectares59 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Boston leads by 18 points.18
BostonBruges
Score5840
Notable places within 2 km11140
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bruges leads by 17 points.17
BostonBruges
Score4360
Price level global10076.2
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Boston and Bruges are level on 56.
BostonBruges
Score5656
Monthly daytime high2.9 °C to 28 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall79 mm to 107 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
Boston
3
4
8
14
19
25
28
27
23
17
11
6
Bruges
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Boston
5
3
4
6
10
15
18
19
17
14
10
8
Bruges
7
6
7
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Boston
84
79
105
91
83
99
82
80
90
101
93
107
Bruges
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Boston
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Bruges
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Boston
5
5
6
7
8
8
9
9
7
5
5
4
Bruges
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. Boston: 1991-2020 normals, Boston Logan International (3.5 km from centre). Bruges: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (37.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBostonBruges
MadridMAD
7 h 5 m
€570
BOS · 4 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 94 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
1 h 0 m
€192-203
BOS · 4 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€536-548
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
RomeFCO, CIA
8 h 25 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 94 km
DublinDUB
6 h 20 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 94 km
ViennaVIE
8 h 20 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 94 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
13 h 25 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
Abu DhabiAUH
13 h 15 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 94 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
9 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 94 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBostonBruges
Official languageFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation43 m2 m
Main airportBoston Logan International Airport (BOS)4 km from centre144 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)94 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBostonBruges
City population675,647118,509
People per km²2,910840
Museums within 10 km5138
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre7451
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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