VacationSelector

Bucharest or Cardiff?

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

Your match

Bucharest
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Cardiff
48
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.

BucharestCardiff
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
BucharestCardiff
Score046
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km38
Coast distance198 km2 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Bucharest leads by 7 points.7
BucharestCardiff
Score6760
Restaurants within 2 km of centre667541
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4132
Museums & heritage. Bucharest leads by 10 points.10
BucharestCardiff
Score4939
Museums within 10 km7361
Museums within 2 km of centre406
Share of museums within 2 km %5510
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Bucharest leads by 14 points.14
BucharestCardiff
Score6248
Drinking venues within 4 km1,017536
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre541395
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5374
Nightclubs within 4 km8035
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 14 points.14
BucharestCardiff
Score3650
Protected land share 50 km %418
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %10068
Park area within 2 km133 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Bucharest leads by 36 points.36
BucharestCardiff
Score6832
Tourist attractions within 2 km454
Park area within 2 km133 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Bucharest leads by 16 points.16
BucharestCardiff
Score6145
Notable places within 2 km13051
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bucharest leads by 31 points.31
BucharestCardiff
Score8554
Price level global40.984.9
Daily budget€99
Year-round weather. Bucharest leads by 9 points.9
BucharestCardiff
Score6354
Monthly daytime high2.8 °C to 30.5 °C7.7 °C to 20.2 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 82 mm49 mm to 87 mm
Dry months10
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
Bucharest
3
6
12
19
24
28
30
31
25
18
11
4
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Bucharest
No coastline within reach
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rainfall, mm
Bucharest
40
33
42
49
71
82
68
48
62
59
44
47
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Daylight, hours per day
Bucharest
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Bucharest
2
4
5
6
8
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bucharest: 1991-2020 normals, Bucuresti / Imh (10 km from centre). Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBucharestCardiff
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 15 m
€45-61
OTP · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
AntalyaAYT
1 h 45 m
€140-237
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 50 m
€118-127
OTP · 18 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 10 m
€121-131
OTP · 18 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
MadridMAD
3 h 35 m
€109-143
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 45 m
€198-212
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
BarcelonaBCN
3 h 0 m
€92-102
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€79-110
OTP · 18 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 40 m
€92-150
OTP · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
MarrakechRAK
4 h 30 m
no fares
OTP · 18 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 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

MeasureBucharestCardiff
Official languageRomanianEnglish
CurrencyRomanian Leu (RON)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation70 m41 m
Main airportBucharest Henri Coandă International Airport (OTP)18 km from centre123 non-stop destinationsCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBucharestCardiff
City population1,716,961383,536
People per km²7,5972,734
Museums within 10 km419
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre6855
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bucharest or Cardiff 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). 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.