VacationSelector

Cape Town or Chicago?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on value for money and year-round weather with your weighting.

Chicago
56
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

Cape TownChicago
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownChicago
Score6053
Swim season months01
Beaches 10 km2912
Coast distance1 km10,000 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownChicago
Score6781
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6502,147
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4237
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownChicago
Score5446
Museums within 10 km2545
Museums within 2 km of centre2020
Share of museums within 2 km %8044
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownChicago
Score4762
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,123
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389728
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8165
Nightclubs within 4 km4751
Nature & day trips. Chicago leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownChicago
Score3638
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares118 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownChicago
Score3655
Tourist attractions within 2 km1918
Park area within 2 km27 hectares118 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownChicago
Score4570
Notable places within 2 km51217
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownChicago
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
Cape TownChicago
Score8657
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C0.2 °C to 29.4 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm54 mm to 121 mm
Dry months60
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
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
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
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Chicago
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre). Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownChicago
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 45 m
€109-226
ORD · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
8 h 50 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 25 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 2026-09 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

MeasureCape TownChicago
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyRand (ZAR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m179 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownChicago
City population3,776,3132,746,388
People per km²1,5384,529
Museums within 10 km2243
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6587
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone1 month

Where else could you go?

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