VacationSelector

Boston or Santiago?

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, level with your weighting

Boston
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Santiago
55
match

Wins on value for money and year-round weather 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.

BostonSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Boston leads by 60 points.60
BostonSantiago
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km680
Coast distance1 km89 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Boston leads by 1 points.1
BostonSantiago
Score7372
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4521,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3232
Museums & heritage. Santiago leads by 2 points.2
BostonSantiago
Score4345
Museums within 10 km7987
Museums within 2 km of centre2730
Share of museums within 2 km %3434
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Santiago leads by 3 points.3
BostonSantiago
Score5861
Drinking venues within 4 km886912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre513542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5859
Nightclubs within 4 km43112
Nature & day trips. Boston leads by 1 points.1
BostonSantiago
Score5352
Protected land share 50 km %1217
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %77100
Park area within 2 km116 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Boston leads by 4 points.4
BostonSantiago
Score5349
Tourist attractions within 2 km2812
Park area within 2 km116 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Boston leads by 10 points.10
BostonSantiago
Score5848
Notable places within 2 km11162
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 38 points.38
BostonSantiago
Score4381
Price level global10046.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 29 points.29
BostonSantiago
Score5685
Monthly daytime high2.9 °C to 28 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall79 mm to 107 mm0 mm to 87 mm
Dry months08
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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Boston
5
3
4
6
10
15
18
19
17
14
10
8
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Boston
84
79
105
91
83
99
82
80
90
101
93
107
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Boston
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Boston
5
5
6
7
8
8
9
9
7
5
5
4
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

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). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBostonSantiago
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
1 h 0 m
€192-203
BOS · 4 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€536-548
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€211-283
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
2 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
8 h 50 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Punta CanaPUJ
3 h 50 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
7 h 5 m
€570
BOS · 4 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
3 h 5 m
€254-335
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
9 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
3 h 45 m
€267-313
SCL · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
7 h 35 m
€481-586
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
13 h 45 m
€774-838
2 stops
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
7 h 10 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 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

MeasureBostonSantiago
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number911Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation43 m575 m
Main airportBoston Logan International Airport (BOS)4 km from centre144 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureBostonSantiago
City population675,6476,257,516
People per km²2,9107,468
Museums within 10 km5154
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre7464
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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