VacationSelector

Brussels or Seattle?

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.

Seattle
52
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

BrusselsSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 60 points.60
BrusselsSeattle
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km0100
Coast distance56 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Brussels leads by 6 points.6
BrusselsSeattle
Score8175
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,7791,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4435
Museums & heritage. Brussels leads by 44 points.44
BrusselsSeattle
Score8036
Museums within 10 km12028
Museums within 2 km of centre5917
Share of museums within 2 km %4961
Unesco sites within 50 km100
Nightlife. Brussels leads by 11 points.11
BrusselsSeattle
Score6857
Drinking venues within 4 km1,414873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre862696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6180
Nightclubs within 4 km8434
Nature & day trips. Seattle leads by 9 points.9
BrusselsSeattle
Score3140
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km65 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Brussels leads by 10 points.10
BrusselsSeattle
Score5646
Tourist attractions within 2 km2817
Park area within 2 km65 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Brussels leads by 21 points.21
BrusselsSeattle
Score7352
Notable places within 2 km25476
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Brussels leads by 17 points.17
BrusselsSeattle
Score6043
Price level global76.2100
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Seattle leads by 4 points.4
BrusselsSeattle
Score5761
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.3 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm15 mm to 160 mm
Dry months03
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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Brussels
No coastline within reach
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Brussels
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Brussels
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Brussels
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
Seattle
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Brussels: 1991-2020 normals, Uccle (5.2 km from centre). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrusselsSeattle
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
5 h 15 m
€300-424
SEA · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 11 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
5 h 0 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 11 km
10 h 20 m
€554-583
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
8 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
3 h 55 m
€257-317
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 11 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 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

MeasureBrusselsSeattle
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-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation70 m40 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)11 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrusselsSeattle
City population195,546737,015
People per km²5,9081,996
Museums within 10 km10527
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km100
Distinct cuisines in the centre10978
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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