VacationSelector

Buenos Aires or Chicago?

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

Your match

Buenos Aires
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Chicago
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat 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.

Buenos AiresChicago
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 20 points.20
Buenos AiresChicago
Score3353
Swim season months41
Beaches 10 km012
Coast distance2 km10,000 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 14 points.14
Buenos AiresChicago
Score6781
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1972,147
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2637
Museums & heritage. Buenos Aires leads by 20 points.20
Buenos AiresChicago
Score6646
Museums within 10 km14845
Museums within 2 km of centre7120
Share of museums within 2 km %4844
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Buenos Aires leads by 6 points.6
Buenos AiresChicago
Score6862
Drinking venues within 4 km1,2951,123
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre777728
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6065
Nightclubs within 4 km16051
Nature & day trips. Buenos Aires leads by 5 points.5
Buenos AiresChicago
Score4338
Protected land share 50 km %96
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %67100
Park area within 2 km69 hectares118 hectares
Good for families. Buenos Aires leads by 14 points.14
Buenos AiresChicago
Score6955
Tourist attractions within 2 km4918
Park area within 2 km69 hectares118 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km62
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 10 points.10
Buenos AiresChicago
Score6070
Notable places within 2 km125217
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Buenos Aires leads by 39 points.39
Buenos AiresChicago
Score8243
Price level global45.8100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Buenos Aires leads by 18 points.18
Buenos AiresChicago
Score7557
Monthly daytime high14.7 °C to 28.5 °C0.2 °C to 29.4 °C
Monthly rainfall50 mm to 135 mm54 mm to 121 mm
Dry months00
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
Buenos Aires
29
27
26
22
19
16
15
17
18
22
24
28
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Sea temperature, °C
Buenos Aires
25
25
23
21
17
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Rainfall, mm
Buenos Aires
135
94
123
122
85
54
50
52
58
98
87
107
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Daylight, hours per day
Buenos Aires
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Buenos Aires
10
8
8
6
6
4
5
6
6
7
8
9
Chicago
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Buenos Aires: 1991-2020 normals, Aeroparque Bs. As. Aerodrome (4.9 km from centre). Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBuenos AiresChicago
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 40 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
2 h 40 m
€283-314
EZE · 28 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
9 h 5 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
2 h 55 m
€134-218
ORD · 25 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
10 h 10 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
MadridMAD
12 h 30 m
€961-982
EZE · 28 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
Punta CanaPUJ
7 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
4 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
11 h 15 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
9 h 20 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
CancunCUN
8 h 45 m
no fares
EZE · 28 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 45 m
€1,481-1680
EZE · 28 km
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 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

MeasureBuenos AiresChicago
Official languageSpanish
CurrencyArgentine Peso (ARS)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCI220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number117 or 911911
Elevation25 m179 m
Main airportEzeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)28 km from centre53 non-stop destinationsChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBuenos AiresChicago
City population3,121,7072,746,388
People per km²15,3554,529
Museums within 10 km7543
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre5587
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months1 month

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Buenos Aires or Chicago 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). 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. 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.