VacationSelector

Calgary or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Calgary
38
match

Wins on good for families with your weighting.

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

CalgaryCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
CalgaryCape Town
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km429
Coast distance649 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
CalgaryCape Town
Score6667
Restaurants within 2 km of centre749650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3642
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 45 points.45
CalgaryCape Town
Score954
Museums within 10 km825
Museums within 2 km of centre320
Share of museums within 2 km %3880
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
CalgaryCape Town
Score4447
Drinking venues within 4 km465483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre343389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7481
Nightclubs within 4 km1947
Nature & day trips. Calgary and Cape Town are level on 36.
CalgaryCape Town
Score3636
Protected land share 50 km %46
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10042
Park area within 2 km142 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Calgary leads by 5 points.5
CalgaryCape Town
Score4136
Tourist attractions within 2 km319
Park area within 2 km142 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km50
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
CalgaryCape Town
Score3945
Notable places within 2 km3751
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
CalgaryCape Town
Score5485
Price level global8440.5
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
CalgaryCape Town
Score5786
Monthly daytime high-0.7 °C to 24.8 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall9 mm to 106 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months86
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
Calgary
0
-1
4
11
16
20
25
23
19
12
4
0
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Calgary
No coastline within reach
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Calgary
9
13
19
28
58
106
44
47
33
21
17
17
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Calgary
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Calgary
No sunshine record
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Calgary: 1991-2020 normals, Calgary Int'l CS (8.2 km from centre). Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCalgaryCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 55 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
4 h 30 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 30 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
4 h 20 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
9 h 50 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
9 h 20 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
9 h 5 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
4 h 15 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 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

MeasureCalgaryCape Town
Official languageFrench, EnglishEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyCanadian Dollar (CAD)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-7, UTC-6 in summerUTC+2
Emergency number911112
Elevation1,045 m5 m
Main airportCalgary International Airport (YYC)9 km from centre106 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCalgaryCape Town
City population1,306,7843,776,313
People per km²1,5831,538
Museums within 10 km1322
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre6765
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Calgary or Cape Town 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). 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.