VacationSelector

Cape Town or Melbourne?

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

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on nightlife 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 TownMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownMelbourne
Score6055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2919
Coast distance1 km4 km
Water distance1 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownMelbourne
Score6775
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4229
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownMelbourne
Score5449
Museums within 10 km2542
Museums within 2 km of centre2024
Share of museums within 2 km %8057
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownMelbourne
Score4774
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3891,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8162
Nightclubs within 4 km47124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownMelbourne
Score3643
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4281
Park area within 2 km27 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownMelbourne
Score3660
Tourist attractions within 2 km1926
Park area within 2 km27 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownMelbourne
Score4557
Notable places within 2 km51103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 35 points.35
Cape TownMelbourne
Score8550
Price level global40.590.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownMelbourne
Score8676
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm45 mm to 69 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

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). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMelbourne
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 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 TownMelbourne
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageEnglish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation5 m31 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMelbourne
City population3,776,3135,350,705
People per km²1,538535
Museums within 10 km2242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre6586
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 Melbourne 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.