VacationSelector

Budapest or Seattle?

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 value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Seattle
52
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BudapestSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 60 points.60
BudapestSeattle
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km6100
Coast distance10,000 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 2 points.2
BudapestSeattle
Score7775
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,6991,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3535
Museums & heritage. Budapest leads by 28 points.28
BudapestSeattle
Score6436
Museums within 10 km14428
Museums within 2 km of centre6417
Share of museums within 2 km %4461
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 15 points.15
BudapestSeattle
Score7257
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6680
Nightclubs within 4 km9734
Nature & day trips. Budapest and Seattle are level on 40.
BudapestSeattle
Score4040
Protected land share 50 km %89
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km111 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 25 points.25
BudapestSeattle
Score7146
Tourist attractions within 2 km7517
Park area within 2 km111 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 17 points.17
BudapestSeattle
Score6952
Notable places within 2 km20676
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 37 points.37
BudapestSeattle
Score8043
Price level global48100
Daily budget€104
Year-round weather. Budapest leads by 3 points.3
BudapestSeattle
Score6461
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 75 mm15 mm to 160 mm
Dry months53
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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Budapest
No coastline within reach
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Seattle
No sunshine record

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). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestSeattle
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 50 m
€87-214
BUD · 18 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€52-62
BUD · 18 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 40 m
€123-153
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 20 m
€554-583
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
10 h 15 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€93-118
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 25 m
€276-394
2 stops
BUD · 18 km
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
4 h 35 m
€325-346
2 stops
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 2026-09 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

MeasureBudapestSeattle
Official languageHungarian
CurrencyForint (HUF)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation117 m40 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestSeattle
City population1,685,209737,015
People per km²3,2091,996
Museums within 10 km8127
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8678
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 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). 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.