VacationSelector

Cape Town or Seoul?

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 beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on good for families and nightlife 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 TownSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 45 points.45
Cape TownSeoul
Score6015
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km28 km
Water distance1 km28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 18 points.18
Cape TownSeoul
Score6785
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6503,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4232
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 29 points.29
Cape TownSeoul
Score5483
Museums within 10 km25203
Museums within 2 km of centre2090
Share of museums within 2 km %8044
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 33 points.33
Cape TownSeoul
Score4780
Drinking venues within 4 km4833,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3891,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8150
Nightclubs within 4 km4729
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownSeoul
Score3632
Protected land share 50 km %61
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4295
Park area within 2 km27 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 43 points.43
Cape TownSeoul
Score3679
Tourist attractions within 2 km1962
Park area within 2 km27 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km08
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 14 points.14
Cape TownSeoul
Score4559
Notable places within 2 km51118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownSeoul
Score8572
Price level global40.559.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 25 points.25
Cape TownSeoul
Score8661
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm18 mm to 422 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
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5

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). Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownSeoul
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
10 h 45 m
€646-685
ICN · 49 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
6 h 5 m
€248-279
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
10 h 0 m
€493-591
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
14 h 10 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 40 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
ICN · 49 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 TownSeoul
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Won (KRW)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+9
Emergency number112Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation5 m38 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownSeoul
City population3,776,3139,668,465
People per km²1,53815,973
Museums within 10 km2280
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre65156
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

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