VacationSelector

Cape Town or Tampa?

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 value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Tampa
44
match

Wins on 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 TownTampa
Beaches & swimming. Tampa leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownTampa
Score6075
Swim season months08
Beaches 10 km2910
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownTampa
Score6754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4231
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 27 points.27
Cape TownTampa
Score5427
Museums within 10 km2513
Museums within 2 km of centre2010
Share of museums within 2 km %8077
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownTampa
Score4739
Drinking venues within 4 km483324
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389227
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8170
Nightclubs within 4 km4726
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownTampa
Score3630
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4272
Park area within 2 km27 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownTampa
Score3630
Tourist attractions within 2 km193
Park area within 2 km27 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km05
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownTampa
Score4521
Notable places within 2 km5113
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownTampa
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownTampa
Score8675
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C21.5 °C to 32.6 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm36 mm to 228 mm
Dry months61
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
Tampa
22
23
25
28
31
32
32
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Tampa
18
18
20
23
26
28
30
30
29
27
23
20
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Tampa
66
66
64
64
67
187
197
228
156
60
36
65
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Tampa
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
Tampa
7
7
9
10
11
10
9
10
8
8
7
7

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). Tampa: 1991-2020 normals, Tampa International Airport (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownTampa
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 35 m
€178-237
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
8 h 10 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 45 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
MCO · 125 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 TownTampa
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 m30 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsTampa International Airport (TPA)8 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownTampa
City population3,776,313384,959
People per km²1,538848
Museums within 10 km226
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6547
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone8 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or Tampa 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.