VacationSelector

Budapest or Cardiff?

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

Your match

Budapest
✓ Best match
60
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.

BudapestCardiff
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
BudapestCardiff
Score046
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km68
Coast distance10,000 km2 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 17 points.17
BudapestCardiff
Score7760
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,699541
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3532
Museums & heritage. Budapest leads by 25 points.25
BudapestCardiff
Score6439
Museums within 10 km14461
Museums within 2 km of centre646
Share of museums within 2 km %4410
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 24 points.24
BudapestCardiff
Score7248
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765536
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168395
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6674
Nightclubs within 4 km9735
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
BudapestCardiff
Score4050
Protected land share 50 km %818
Landscape blanket share 50 km %015
Land share of disc %10068
Park area within 2 km111 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 39 points.39
BudapestCardiff
Score7132
Tourist attractions within 2 km754
Park area within 2 km111 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 24 points.24
BudapestCardiff
Score6945
Notable places within 2 km20651
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 26 points.26
BudapestCardiff
Score8054
Price level global4884.9
Daily budget€104
Year-round weather. Budapest leads by 10 points.10
BudapestCardiff
Score6454
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C7.7 °C to 20.2 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 75 mm49 mm to 87 mm
Dry months50
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
Budapest
4
7
11
17
22
26
27
28
22
16
9
4
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Budapest
No coastline within reach
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
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. Budapest: 1991-2020 normals, Budapest Met Center (2.1 km from centre). Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestCardiff
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 40 m
€42-56
BUD · 18 km
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€93-118
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
AntalyaAYT
2 h 25 m
€151-177
BUD · 18 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 50 m
€87-214
BUD · 18 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
MadridMAD
3 h 0 m
€84-154
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€52-62
BUD · 18 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
MarrakechRAK
4 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 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

MeasureBudapestCardiff
Official languageHungarianEnglish
CurrencyForint (HUF)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation117 m41 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestCardiff
City population1,685,209383,536
People per km²3,2092,734
Museums within 10 km819
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre8655
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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