VacationSelector

Bucharest or Philadelphia?

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 value for money and good for families with your weighting.

Philadelphia
51
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

BucharestPhiladelphia
Beaches & swimming. Bucharest and Philadelphia are level on 0.
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km31
Coast distance198 km13 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Philadelphia leads by 10 points.10
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score6777
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6671,714
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4135
Museums & heritage. Philadelphia leads by 11 points.11
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score4960
Museums within 10 km7389
Museums within 2 km of centre4048
Share of museums within 2 km %5554
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Bucharest leads by 3 points.3
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score6259
Drinking venues within 4 km1,017930
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre541575
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5362
Nightclubs within 4 km8041
Nature & day trips. Philadelphia leads by 13 points.13
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score3649
Protected land share 50 km %414
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10089
Park area within 2 km133 hectares75 hectares
Good for families. Bucharest leads by 15 points.15
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score6853
Tourist attractions within 2 km4516
Park area within 2 km133 hectares75 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Bucharest leads by 7 points.7
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score6154
Notable places within 2 km13088
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bucharest leads by 42 points.42
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score8543
Price level global40.9100
Daily budget€99
Year-round weather. Bucharest leads by 3 points.3
BucharestPhiladelphia
Score6360
Monthly daytime high2.8 °C to 30.5 °C5.2 °C to 31 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 82 mm69 mm to 112 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
Philadelphia
5
7
12
18
24
28
31
30
26
20
13
8
Rainfall, mm
Bucharest
40
33
42
49
71
82
68
48
62
59
44
47
Philadelphia
79
69
101
88
86
103
111
109
112
88
74
101
Daylight, hours per day
Bucharest
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Philadelphia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Bucharest
2
4
5
6
8
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
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. Bucharest: 1991-2020 normals, Bucuresti / Imh (10 km from centre). Philadelphia: 1991-2020 normals, Philadelphia International Airport (11.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBucharestPhiladelphia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 10 m
€72-175
OTP · 18 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 50 m
€118-127
OTP · 18 km
7 h 40 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 10 m
€121-131
OTP · 18 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 15 m
€45-61
OTP · 18 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€79-110
OTP · 18 km
8 h 55 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 40 m
€92-150
OTP · 18 km
8 h 40 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 45 m
€198-212
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 45 m
€82-113
OTP · 18 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
2 h 30 m
€144-199
OTP · 18 km
11 h 25 m
€622-836
1 stop
JFK · 140 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 20 m
€123-173
1 stop
OTP · 18 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
PHL · 11 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

MeasureBucharestPhiladelphia
Official languageRomanian
CurrencyRomanian Leu (RON)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation70 m12 m
Main airportBucharest Henri Coandă International Airport (OTP)18 km from centre123 non-stop destinationsPhiladelphia International Airport (PHL)11 km from centre128 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBucharestPhiladelphia
City population1,716,9611,603,797
People per km²7,5974,339
Museums within 10 km4154
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre6875

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bucharest 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). 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.