VacationSelector

Cardiff or Kyoto?

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.

Kyoto
✓ Best match
58
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.

CardiffKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 29 points.29
CardiffKyoto
Score4617
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km80
Coast distance2 km47 km
Water distance2 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 24 points.24
CardiffKyoto
Score6084
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5415,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3222
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 33 points.33
CardiffKyoto
Score3972
Museums within 10 km61132
Museums within 2 km of centre651
Share of museums within 2 km %1039
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 32 points.32
CardiffKyoto
Score4880
Drinking venues within 4 km5363,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3952,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7473
Nightclubs within 4 km3526
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 28 points.28
CardiffKyoto
Score5022
Protected land share 50 km %182
Landscape blanket share 50 km %152
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 34 points.34
CardiffKyoto
Score3266
Tourist attractions within 2 km462
Park area within 2 km88 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 7 points.7
CardiffKyoto
Score4552
Notable places within 2 km5179
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 16 points.16
CardiffKyoto
Score5470
Price level global84.962.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Kyoto leads by 8 points.8
CardiffKyoto
Score5462
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm40 mm to 232 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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

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). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffKyoto
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
DusseldorfDUS, NRN
1 h 20 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
13 h 10 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
7 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 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

MeasureCardiffKyoto
Official languageEnglishJapanese
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Yen (JPY)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112 or 999Police 110, fire 119
Elevation41 m51 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffKyoto
City population383,5361,463,723
People per km²2,7341,768
Museums within 10 km976
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre5589
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Kyoto 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. 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.