VacationSelector

Cape Town or Manila?

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

Your match

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on year-round weather and places to eat with your weighting.

Manila
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on good for families and 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 TownManila
Beaches & swimming. Manila leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownManila
Score6076
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km293
Coast distance1 km2 km
Water distance1 km2 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownManila
Score6758
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,015
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4217
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownManila
Score5450
Museums within 10 km2577
Museums within 2 km of centre2023
Share of museums within 2 km %8030
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Manila leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownManila
Score4761
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,082
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389374
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8135
Nightclubs within 4 km4736
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownManila
Score3629
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4278
Park area within 2 km27 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Manila leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownManila
Score3660
Tourist attractions within 2 km1937
Park area within 2 km27 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Manila leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownManila
Score4552
Notable places within 2 km5179
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Manila leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownManila
Score8590
Price level global40.533.7
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownManila
Score8661
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C30.5 °C to 34.6 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm24 mm to 564 mm
Dry months64
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
Manila
31
31
33
35
34
33
32
31
31
32
31
31
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Manila
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Manila
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). Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownManila
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
3 h 30 m
€154-174
MNL · 11 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
8 h 45 m
€428-448
MNL · 11 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
16 h 45 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
Addis AbabaADD
6 h 50 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
MNL · 11 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 2026-08 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 TownManila
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageEnglish, Filipino, Taglish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Philippine Peso (PHP)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+8
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m9 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownManila
City population3,776,3131,902,590
People per km²1,53876,104
Museums within 10 km2227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6539
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone12 months

Where else could you go?

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