VacationSelector

Cape Town or Orlando?

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 museums & heritage with your weighting.

Orlando
40
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 TownOrlando
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownOrlando
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km68 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownOrlando
Score6748
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650365
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4221
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 46 points.46
Cape TownOrlando
Score548
Museums within 10 km2511
Museums within 2 km of centre202
Share of museums within 2 km %8018
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownOrlando
Score4741
Drinking venues within 4 km483344
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389216
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8163
Nightclubs within 4 km4739
Nature & day trips. Orlando leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownOrlando
Score3644
Protected land share 50 km %615
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %42100
Park area within 2 km27 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Orlando leads by 53 points.53
Cape TownOrlando
Score3689
Tourist attractions within 2 km19
Park area within 2 km27 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km020
Theme park ground ha 30 km8,853
Zoo aquarium 15 km2
Scoring variantfamilyScoreThemeGroundLed
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
Cape TownOrlando
Score4516
Notable places within 2 km5110
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownOrlando
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownOrlando
Score8674
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C22.1 °C to 33.3 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm46 mm to 203 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
Orlando
22
24
26
29
31
33
33
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Orlando
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Orlando
63
52
77
66
101
203
189
195
160
88
46
63
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Orlando
11
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Orlando
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). Orlando: 1991-2020 normals, Orlando Airport (14.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownOrlando
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€158-197
MCO · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
8 h 50 m
€483-548
1 stop
MCO · 14 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
MCO · 14 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
€32-127
MCO · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
MCO · 14 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
MCO · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 45 m
no fares
MCO · 14 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
TPA · 128 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
MCO · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
MCO · 14 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 TownOrlando
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 m34 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsOrlando International Airport (MCO)14 km from centre169 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownOrlando
City population3,776,313334,854
People per km²1,5381,086
Museums within 10 km2211
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6530
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 Orlando 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.