VacationSelector

Cape Town or Miami?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Miami
56
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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 TownMiami
Beaches & swimming. Miami leads by 35 points.35
Cape TownMiami
Score6095
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km2920
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownMiami
Score6765
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650898
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4229
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownMiami
Score5423
Museums within 10 km2528
Museums within 2 km of centre206
Share of museums within 2 km %8021
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Miami leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownMiami
Score4750
Drinking venues within 4 km483538
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389287
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8153
Nightclubs within 4 km4763
Nature & day trips. Miami leads by 36 points.36
Cape TownMiami
Score3672
Protected land share 50 km %616
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4248
Park area within 2 km27 hectares50 hectares
Good for families. Miami leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownMiami
Score3644
Tourist attractions within 2 km1914
Park area within 2 km27 hectares50 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownMiami
Score4542
Notable places within 2 km5145
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownMiami
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownMiami
Score8674
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C24.7 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm47 mm to 267 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
Miami
25
26
27
29
31
32
33
33
32
30
28
26
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Miami
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Miami
47
55
63
85
157
267
186
242
259
193
90
62
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Miami
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Miami
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). Miami: 1991-2020 normals, Miami International Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownMiami
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
9 h 0 m
€550-628
1 stop
MIA · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 45 m
€205-247
MIA · 7 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
€97-175
MIA · 7 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€127-180
MIA · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
9 h 50 m
no fares
MIA · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
15 h 30 m
€891-1074
2 stops
MIA · 7 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
MIA · 7 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
MIA · 7 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MIA · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
MIA · 7 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 TownMiami
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyRand (ZAR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m2 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsMiami International Airport (MIA)7 km from centre199 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownMiami
City population3,776,313442,241
People per km²1,5383,046
Museums within 10 km2217
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
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 Miami 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.