VacationSelector

Cape Town or Inverness?

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 places to eat and good for families with your weighting.

Inverness
25
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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 TownInverness
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 32 points.32
Cape TownInverness
Score6028
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 46 points.46
Cape TownInverness
Score6721
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650114
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4211
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 34 points.34
Cape TownInverness
Score5420
Museums within 10 km256
Museums within 2 km of centre205
Share of museums within 2 km %8083
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 32 points.32
Cape TownInverness
Score4715
Drinking venues within 4 km483113
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre38998
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8187
Nightclubs within 4 km474
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownInverness
Score369
Protected land share 50 km %612
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %4288
Park area within 2 km27 hectares3 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 36 points.36
Cape TownInverness
Score360
Tourist attractions within 2 km193
Park area within 2 km27 hectares3 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownInverness
Score4524
Notable places within 2 km5116
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownInverness
Score8554
Price level global40.584.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 34 points.34
Cape TownInverness
Score8652
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C6.6 °C to 18.9 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm40 mm to 72 mm
Dry months61
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
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1

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). Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownInverness
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
INV · 12 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 TownInverness
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageEnglish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+2UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation5 m7 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownInverness
City population3,776,31347,380
People per km²1,5382,289
Museums within 10 km223
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6515
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or Inverness 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.