VacationSelector

Cape Town or York?

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 value for money with your weighting.

York
41
match

Wins on 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 TownYork
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town leads by 60 points.60
Cape TownYork
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km292
Coast distance1 km50 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
Cape TownYork
Score6754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre650361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4231
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownYork
Score5446
Museums within 10 km2518
Museums within 2 km of centre2016
Share of museums within 2 km %8089
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
Cape TownYork
Score4743
Drinking venues within 4 km483450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8178
Nightclubs within 4 km4714
Nature & day trips. Cape Town leads by 3 points.3
Cape TownYork
Score3633
Protected land share 50 km %617
Landscape blanket share 50 km %016
Land share of disc %4295
Park area within 2 km27 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. York leads by 7 points.7
Cape TownYork
Score3643
Tourist attractions within 2 km1913
Park area within 2 km27 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 6 points.6
Cape TownYork
Score4539
Notable places within 2 km5137
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 31 points.31
Cape TownYork
Score8554
Price level global40.584.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 30 points.30
Cape TownYork
Score8656
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm39 mm to 66 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
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
York
2
3
4
5
6
5
6
5
4
3
2
2

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). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownYork
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
13 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 104 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 TownYork
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageEnglish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+2UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation5 m25 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownYork
City population3,776,313208,400
People per km²1,538766
Museums within 10 km2224
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre6554
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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