VacationSelector

Cape Town or Tirana?

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.

Tirana
51
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 TownTirana
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 43 points.43
Cape TownTirana
Score6017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km290
Coast distance1 km26 km
Water distance1 km26 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownTirana
Score6755
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650572
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4222
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 29 points.29
Cape TownTirana
Score5425
Museums within 10 km2512
Museums within 2 km of centre208
Share of museums within 2 km %8067
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Tirana leads by 11 points.11
Cape TownTirana
Score4758
Drinking venues within 4 km483945
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389683
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8172
Nightclubs within 4 km4729
Nature & day trips. Tirana leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownTirana
Score3649
Protected land share 50 km %611
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %4283
Park area within 2 km27 hectares147 hectares
Good for families. Tirana leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownTirana
Score3652
Tourist attractions within 2 km1921
Park area within 2 km27 hectares147 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Tirana leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownTirana
Score4553
Notable places within 2 km5183
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 1 points.1
Cape TownTirana
Score8584
Price level global40.542.6
Daily budget€76
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownTirana
Score8667
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C11.6 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm43 mm to 172 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
Tirana
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Tirana
15
14
14
16
19
23
24
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Tirana
143
117
116
103
84
66
43
55
78
114
172
148
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Tirana
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Tirana
4
4
5
6
9
10
12
11
9
7
4
3

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). Tirana: 1961-1990 normals, Tirana (3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownTirana
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 55 m
€62-138
TIA · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 30 m
€73-102
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 10 m
€94-143
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 35 m
€100-109
TIA · 13 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 35 m
€169-220
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
TIA · 13 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 TownTirana
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageAlbanian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Lek (ALL)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m110 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsTirana International Airport Mother Teresa (TIA)13 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownTirana
City population3,776,313389,323
People per km²1,5389,314
Museums within 10 km2211
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6546
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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