VacationSelector

Cape Town or Rotterdam?

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

Rotterdam
54
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage 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 TownRotterdam
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownRotterdam
Score6037
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2922
Coast distance1 km24 km
Water distance1 km24 km
Places to eat. Rotterdam leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownRotterdam
Score6772
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650862
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4246
Museums & heritage. Rotterdam leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownRotterdam
Score5460
Museums within 10 km2541
Museums within 2 km of centre2020
Share of museums within 2 km %8049
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Rotterdam leads by 2 points.2
Cape TownRotterdam
Score4749
Drinking venues within 4 km483542
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389378
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8170
Nightclubs within 4 km4740
Nature & day trips. Rotterdam leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownRotterdam
Score3642
Protected land share 50 km %610
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4279
Park area within 2 km27 hectares61 hectares
Good for families. Rotterdam leads by 26 points.26
Cape TownRotterdam
Score3662
Tourist attractions within 2 km1927
Park area within 2 km27 hectares61 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km08
Sights concentration. Rotterdam leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownRotterdam
Score4551
Notable places within 2 km5174
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownRotterdam
Score8558
Price level global40.579.2
Daily budget—€181
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 30 points.30
Cape TownRotterdam
Score8656
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C6.2 °C to 22.1 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm42 mm to 85 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
Rotterdam
6
7
10
14
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rotterdam
6
5
6
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Rotterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Rotterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Rotterdam
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). Rotterdam: 1993-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Rotterdam Airport Zestienhoven (3.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownRotterdam
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 10 m
€178-300
AMS · 47 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 47 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
6 h 45 m
€318-346
1 stop
AMS · 47 km
JohannesburgJNB, HLA
2 h 10 m
€162-179
CPT · 18 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
AMS · 47 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
€159-284
RTM · 5 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
€152-186
AMS · 47 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 15 m
€140-185
RTM · 5 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
AMS · 47 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 47 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 0 m
no fares
AMS · 47 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 TownRotterdam
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 m10 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsRotterdam The Hague Airport (RTM)5 km from centre45 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownRotterdam
City population3,776,313664,311
People per km²1,5382,080
Museums within 10 km2240
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre6577
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 Rotterdam 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.