VacationSelector

Cardiff or Seattle?

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 value for money and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Seattle
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on places to eat and beaches & swimming 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.

CardiffSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 14 points.14
CardiffSeattle
Score4660
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km8100
Coast distance2 km1 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Seattle leads by 15 points.15
CardiffSeattle
Score6075
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5411,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3235
Museums & heritage. Cardiff leads by 3 points.3
CardiffSeattle
Score3936
Museums within 10 km6128
Museums within 2 km of centre617
Share of museums within 2 km %1061
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Seattle leads by 9 points.9
CardiffSeattle
Score4857
Drinking venues within 4 km536873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7480
Nightclubs within 4 km3534
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 10 points.10
CardiffSeattle
Score5040
Protected land share 50 km %189
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %6880
Park area within 2 km88 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Seattle leads by 14 points.14
CardiffSeattle
Score3246
Tourist attractions within 2 km417
Park area within 2 km88 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Seattle leads by 7 points.7
CardiffSeattle
Score4552
Notable places within 2 km5176
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cardiff leads by 11 points.11
CardiffSeattle
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Seattle leads by 7 points.7
CardiffSeattle
Score5461
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm15 mm to 160 mm
Dry months03
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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Seattle
No sunshine record

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). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffSeattle
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
4 h 35 m
€325-346
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
10 h 20 m
€554-583
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 30 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
ReykjavikKEF, RKV
2 h 50 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
CancunCUN
9 h 55 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
5 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 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

MeasureCardiffSeattle
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation41 m40 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffSeattle
City population383,536737,015
People per km²2,7341,996
Museums within 10 km927
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5578
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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