VacationSelector

Cape Town or Maastricht?

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 beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Maastricht
41
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips 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 TownMaastricht
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownMaastricht
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km296
Coast distance1 km118 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownMaastricht
Score6748
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650338
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4222
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMaastricht
Score5453
Museums within 10 km2523
Museums within 2 km of centre2013
Share of museums within 2 km %8057
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownMaastricht
Score4730
Drinking venues within 4 km483223
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389182
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8182
Nightclubs within 4 km4713
Nature & day trips. Maastricht leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownMaastricht
Score3637
Protected land share 50 km %619
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares33 hectares
Good for families. Maastricht leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownMaastricht
Score3646
Tourist attractions within 2 km1915
Park area within 2 km27 hectares33 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km05
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownMaastricht
Score4536
Notable places within 2 km5132
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownMaastricht
Score8558
Price level global40.579.2
Daily budget—€181
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownMaastricht
Score8659
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C5.7 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm41 mm to 84 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
Maastricht
6
7
11
15
19
22
24
24
20
15
10
6
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Maastricht
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Maastricht
64
58
55
41
58
69
73
84
58
65
62
74
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Maastricht
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Maastricht
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

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). Maastricht: 1991-2020 normals, Maastricht Airport Zuid Limburg (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMaastricht
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 85 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
50 m
no fares
BRU · 85 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 TownMaastricht
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageDutch
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 911
Elevation5 m49 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMaastricht Aachen Airport (MST)9 km from centre5 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMaastricht
City population3,776,313120,227
People per km²1,5382,000
Museums within 10 km2221
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre6533
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

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