VacationSelector

Cape Town or Venice?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on places to eat and year-round weather with your weighting.

Venice
57
match

Wins on sights concentration 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 TownVenice
Beaches & swimming. Venice leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownVenice
Score6069
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km2920
Coast distance1 km4 km
Water distance1 km4 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 22 points.22
Cape TownVenice
Score6745
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650750
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4210
Museums & heritage. Venice leads by 18 points.18
Cape TownVenice
Score5472
Museums within 10 km2557
Museums within 2 km of centre2045
Share of museums within 2 km %8079
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 12 points.12
Cape TownVenice
Score4735
Drinking venues within 4 km483342
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389306
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8189
Nightclubs within 4 km473
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 19 points.19
Cape TownVenice
Score3617
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4270
Park area within 2 km27 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Venice leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownVenice
Score3657
Tourist attractions within 2 km1972
Park area within 2 km27 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Venice leads by 38 points.38
Cape TownVenice
Score4583
Notable places within 2 km51464
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownVenice
Score8568
Price level global40.564.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 20 points.20
Cape TownVenice
Score8666
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C8 °C to 30.4 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm36 mm to 106 mm
Dry months62
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
Venice
8
10
15
19
24
28
30
30
25
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Venice
10
9
10
14
18
23
25
26
23
19
16
13
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Venice
38
36
54
78
91
75
65
74
106
89
95
60
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Venice
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Venice
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
9
6
4
3
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). Venice: 1991-2020 normals, Treviso / S. Angelo (26.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownVenice
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€46-119
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€68-109
VCE · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 20 m
€136-186
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 45 m
€190-215
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 20 m
€148-150
VCE · 7 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
€268-289
VCE · 7 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
VCE · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
5 h 55 m
€366-421
2 stops
VCE · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 7 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 7 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 TownVenice
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageItalian
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m2 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsVenice Marco Polo Airport (VCE)7 km from centre98 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownVenice
City population3,776,313250,369
People per km²1,538602
Museums within 10 km2252
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre6546
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 Venice 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.