VacationSelector

Cardiff or Hamburg?

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

Your match

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Hamburg
✓ Best match
53
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.

CardiffHamburg
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffHamburg
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km816
Coast distance2 km22 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Hamburg leads by 13 points.13
CardiffHamburg
Score6073
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5411,150
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3238
Museums & heritage. Hamburg leads by 21 points.21
CardiffHamburg
Score3960
Museums within 10 km6194
Museums within 2 km of centre650
Share of museums within 2 km %1053
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Hamburg leads by 20 points.20
CardiffHamburg
Score4868
Drinking venues within 4 km5361,339
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395834
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7462
Nightclubs within 4 km35119
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
CardiffHamburg
Score5040
Protected land share 50 km %1814
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1510
Land share of disc %6899
Park area within 2 km88 hectares89 hectares
Good for families. Hamburg leads by 28 points.28
CardiffHamburg
Score3260
Tourist attractions within 2 km440
Park area within 2 km88 hectares89 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Hamburg leads by 14 points.14
CardiffHamburg
Score4559
Notable places within 2 km51118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Hamburg leads by 6 points.6
CardiffHamburg
Score5460
Price level global84.975.9
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Hamburg leads by 1 points.1
CardiffHamburg
Score5455
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C4.3 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm39 mm to 82 mm
Dry months01
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
Hamburg
4
5
9
14
18
21
23
23
19
14
8
5
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Hamburg
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Hamburg
67
55
57
39
58
74
82
77
65
63
61
72
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Hamburg
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Hamburg
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
2
1

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). Hamburg: 1991-2020 normals, Hamburg Airport (9.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffHamburg
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
MunichMUC
1 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 20 m
€195-270
HAM · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
3 h 35 m
€162-200
HAM · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 45 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
3 h 0 m
€178-237
HAM · 9 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 30 m
€216-237
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
Puerto del RosarioFUE
3 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
Las PalmasLPA
4 h 0 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
4 h 50 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€127-153
HAM · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
6 h 25 m
€357-416
HAM · 9 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 2026-08 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

MeasureCardiffHamburg
Official languageEnglishGerman
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m6 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsHamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM)9 km from centre119 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffHamburg
City population383,5361,910,160
People per km²2,7342,530
Museums within 10 km977
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre5583
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 Hamburg 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.