VacationSelector

Boston or Edinburgh?

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

Your match

Boston
55
match

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

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families 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.

BostonEdinburgh
Beaches & swimming. Boston leads by 5 points.5
BostonEdinburgh
Score6055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km6820
Coast distance1 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Boston leads by 3 points.3
BostonEdinburgh
Score7370
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4521,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3235
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 14 points.14
BostonEdinburgh
Score4357
Museums within 10 km7930
Museums within 2 km of centre2722
Share of museums within 2 km %3473
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 6 points.6
BostonEdinburgh
Score5864
Drinking venues within 4 km8861,193
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre513884
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5874
Nightclubs within 4 km4365
Nature & day trips. Boston leads by 18 points.18
BostonEdinburgh
Score5335
Protected land share 50 km %122
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %7785
Park area within 2 km116 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 19 points.19
BostonEdinburgh
Score5372
Tourist attractions within 2 km2887
Park area within 2 km116 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
BostonEdinburgh
Score5860
Notable places within 2 km111126
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
BostonEdinburgh
Score4354
Price level global10084.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Boston leads by 5 points.5
BostonEdinburgh
Score5651
Monthly daytime high2.9 °C to 28 °C6.6 °C to 18.8 °C
Monthly rainfall79 mm to 107 mm43 mm to 80 mm
Dry months00
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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Boston
5
3
4
6
10
15
18
19
17
14
10
8
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Boston
84
79
105
91
83
99
82
80
90
101
93
107
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Daylight, hours per day
Boston
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Boston
5
5
6
7
8
8
9
9
7
5
5
4
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
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). Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBostonEdinburgh
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
1 h 0 m
€192-203
BOS · 4 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€536-548
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
7 h 10 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
2 h 20 m
€176-196
BOS · 4 km
7 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
7 h 35 m
€481-586
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
MadridMAD
7 h 5 m
€570
BOS · 4 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
2 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
DublinDUB
6 h 20 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
7 h 10 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 25 m
€117-158
EDI · 11 km
CancunCUN
3 h 55 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 78 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

MeasureBostonEdinburgh
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation43 m47 m
Main airportBoston Logan International Airport (BOS)4 km from centre144 non-stop destinationsEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBostonEdinburgh
City population675,647488,050
People per km²2,9101,884
Museums within 10 km5132
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre7478
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 Edinburgh 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. 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.