VacationSelector

Cape Town or Dubrovnik?

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

Your match

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on nature & day trips and places to eat with your weighting.

Dubrovnik
44
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.

Cape TownDubrovnik
Beaches & swimming. Dubrovnik leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score6077
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km2943
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score6738
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650206
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4218
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score5449
Museums within 10 km2518
Museums within 2 km of centre2017
Share of museums within 2 km %8094
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score4720
Drinking venues within 4 km483128
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389110
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8186
Nightclubs within 4 km4713
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score365
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %4251
Park area within 2 km27 hectares6 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score3621
Tourist attractions within 2 km1912
Park area within 2 km27 hectares6 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score4544
Notable places within 2 km5148
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score8580
Price level global40.548.5
Daily budget€138
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownDubrovnik
Score8665
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11 °C to 29.1 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm54 mm to 198 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
Dubrovnik
11
12
14
18
22
26
29
29
25
21
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Dubrovnik
14
14
14
15
19
23
25
26
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Dubrovnik
141
121
112
127
90
71
54
62
143
145
192
198
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Dubrovnik
9
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
Dubrovnik
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
6
4
4

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). Dubrovnik: 1999-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Dubrovnik / Cilipi (15.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownDubrovnik
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
DBV · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€181-222
1 stop
DBV · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
€63-108
DBV · 16 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€240-268
DBV · 16 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€182-228
1 stop
DBV · 16 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€255-303
1 stop
DBV · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
DBV · 16 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
DBV · 16 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 15 m
no fares
DBV · 16 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 TownDubrovnik
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageCroatian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m10 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsDubrovnik Ruđer Bošković Airport (DBV)16 km from centre74 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownDubrovnik
City population3,776,31341,562
People per km²1,538
Museums within 10 km227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre6532
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or Dubrovnik 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.