VacationSelector

Cape Town or Tokyo?

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.

Tokyo
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on nightlife and good for families 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 TownTokyo
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 39 points.39
Cape TownTokyo
Score6021
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km291
Coast distance1 km5 km
Water distance1 km5 km
Places to eat. Tokyo leads by 23 points.23
Cape TownTokyo
Score6790
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6506,936
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4225
Museums & heritage. Tokyo leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownTokyo
Score5466
Museums within 10 km25302
Museums within 2 km of centre2052
Share of museums within 2 km %8017
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Tokyo leads by 48 points.48
Cape TownTokyo
Score4795
Drinking venues within 4 km4836,895
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3893,033
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8144
Nightclubs within 4 km4758
Nature & day trips. Tokyo leads by 22 points.22
Cape TownTokyo
Score3658
Protected land share 50 km %6—
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4285
Park area within 2 km27 hectares85 hectares
Good for families. Tokyo leads by 35 points.35
Cape TownTokyo
Score3671
Tourist attractions within 2 km1940
Park area within 2 km27 hectares85 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km09
Sights concentration. Tokyo leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownTokyo
Score4560
Notable places within 2 km51121
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownTokyo
Score8570
Price level global40.562.4
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 22 points.22
Cape TownTokyo
Score8664
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C10 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm57 mm to 237 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
Tokyo
10
11
14
19
24
26
30
32
28
22
17
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Tokyo
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Tokyo
60
57
117
134
140
168
157
155
221
237
97
58
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Tokyo
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Tokyo
6
6
6
6
6
4
5
6
4
4
5
6

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). Tokyo: 1991-2020 normals, Tokyo (3.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownTokyo
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
11 h 55 m
€820-907
1 stop
HND · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
6 h 55 m
€353-477
1 stop
HND · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 40 m
€786-939
1 stop
HND · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 30 m
€813-1004
HND · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
12 h 5 m
€835-923
HND · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 10 m
€572-637
1 stop
HND · 18 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
10 h 25 m
€931-1048
1 stop
HND · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 40 m
no fares
HND · 18 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
NRT · 56 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
HND · 18 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 TownTokyo
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageJapanese
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+9
Emergency number112Police 110, fire 119
Elevation5 m6 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsTokyo Haneda International Airport (HND)18 km from centre97 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownTokyo
City population3,776,31314,264,798
People per km²1,5386,501
Museums within 10 km22191
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre65125
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone4 months

Where else could you go?

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