VacationSelector

Cardiff or Shanghai?

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.

Shanghai
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on good for families and value for money 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.

CardiffShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 29 points.29
CardiffShanghai
Score4617
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km80
Coast distance2 km18 km
Water distance2 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 6 points.6
CardiffShanghai
Score3945
Museums within 10 km61108
Museums within 2 km of centre628
Share of museums within 2 km %1026
Unesco sites within 50 km10
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 8 points.8
CardiffShanghai
Score5042
Protected land share 50 km %189
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %6882
Park area within 2 km88 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 49 points.49
CardiffShanghai
Score3281
Tourist attractions within 2 km486
Park area within 2 km88 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km210
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 6 points.6
CardiffShanghai
Score4551
Notable places within 2 km5173
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 25 points.25
CardiffShanghai
Score5479
Price level global84.949
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 11 points.11
CardiffShanghai
Score5465
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm43 mm to 216 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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffShanghai
GenevaGVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ZurichZRH
1 h 45 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 20 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
5 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 15 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureCardiffShanghai
Official languageEnglishPutonghua
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112 or 999Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation41 m4 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffShanghai
City population383,53624,870,895
People per km²2,7343,922
Museums within 10 km944
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5564
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 Shanghai 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.