VacationSelector

Cardiff or Geneva?

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, 2 points apart

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Geneva
50
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage 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.

CardiffGeneva
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffGeneva
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km843
Coast distance2 km279 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Geneva leads by 10 points.10
CardiffGeneva
Score6070
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5411,028
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3235
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 13 points.13
CardiffGeneva
Score3952
Museums within 10 km6135
Museums within 2 km of centre620
Share of museums within 2 km %1057
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Geneva leads by 2 points.2
CardiffGeneva
Score4850
Drinking venues within 4 km536549
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395427
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7478
Nightclubs within 4 km3560
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 9 points.9
CardiffGeneva
Score5059
Protected land share 50 km %1827
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1521
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares182 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 33 points.33
CardiffGeneva
Score3265
Tourist attractions within 2 km428
Park area within 2 km88 hectares182 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Geneva leads by 11 points.11
CardiffGeneva
Score4556
Notable places within 2 km5199
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cardiff leads by 19 points.19
CardiffGeneva
Score5435
Price level global84.9110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Geneva leads by 5 points.5
CardiffGeneva
Score5459
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C5.1 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm55 mm to 94 mm
Dry months00
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
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffGeneva
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
PortoOPO
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 10 m
€127-171
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
55 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 25 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
3 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
GVA · 5 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

MeasureCardiffGeneva
Official languageEnglishFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m403 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffGeneva
City population383,536209,061
People per km²2,73413,148
Museums within 10 km935
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5580
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Geneva 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.