VacationSelector

Brussels or Philadelphia?

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

Your match

Brussels
✓ Best match
56
match

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

Philadelphia
51
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

BrusselsPhiladelphia
Beaches & swimming. Brussels and Philadelphia are level on 0.
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km01
Coast distance56 km13 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Brussels leads by 4 points.4
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score8177
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,7791,714
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4435
Museums & heritage. Brussels leads by 20 points.20
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score8060
Museums within 10 km12089
Museums within 2 km of centre5948
Share of museums within 2 km %4954
Unesco sites within 50 km101
Nightlife. Brussels leads by 9 points.9
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score6859
Drinking venues within 4 km1,414930
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre862575
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6162
Nightclubs within 4 km8441
Nature & day trips. Philadelphia leads by 18 points.18
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score3149
Protected land share 50 km %614
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10089
Park area within 2 km65 hectares75 hectares
Good for families. Brussels leads by 3 points.3
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score5653
Tourist attractions within 2 km2816
Park area within 2 km65 hectares75 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Brussels leads by 19 points.19
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score7354
Notable places within 2 km25488
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Brussels leads by 17 points.17
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score6043
Price level global76.2100
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Philadelphia leads by 3 points.3
BrusselsPhiladelphia
Score5760
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.3 °C5.2 °C to 31 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm69 mm to 112 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
Brussels
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
6
Philadelphia
5
7
12
18
24
28
31
30
26
20
13
8
Rainfall, mm
Brussels
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
Philadelphia
79
69
101
88
86
103
111
109
112
88
74
101
Daylight, hours per day
Brussels
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Philadelphia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Brussels
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
Philadelphia
4
5
6
7
9
9
8
9
7
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Brussels: 1991-2020 normals, Uccle (5.2 km from centre). Philadelphia: 1991-2020 normals, Philadelphia International Airport (11.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrusselsPhiladelphia
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 11 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 11 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
13 h 30 m
€989-1136
JFK · 140 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 11 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
8 h 55 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 45 m
€177-223
BRU · 11 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km
DohaDOH
6 h 25 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
13 h 30 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
JFK · 140 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

MeasureBrusselsPhiladelphia
Official languageFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation70 m12 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)11 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsPhiladelphia International Airport (PHL)11 km from centre128 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrusselsPhiladelphia
City population195,5461,603,797
People per km²5,9084,339
Museums within 10 km10554
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km101
Distinct cuisines in the centre10975

Where else could you go?

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