VacationSelector

Cardiff or Tirana?

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 museums & heritage with your weighting.

Tirana
✓ Best match
51
match

Wins on value for money and good for families 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.

CardiffTirana
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 29 points.29
CardiffTirana
Score4617
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km80
Coast distance2 km26 km
Water distance2 km26 km
Places to eat. Cardiff leads by 5 points.5
CardiffTirana
Score6055
Restaurants within 2 km of centre541572
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3222
Museums & heritage. Cardiff leads by 14 points.14
CardiffTirana
Score3925
Museums within 10 km6112
Museums within 2 km of centre68
Share of museums within 2 km %1067
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Tirana leads by 10 points.10
CardiffTirana
Score4858
Drinking venues within 4 km536945
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395683
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7472
Nightclubs within 4 km3529
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 1 points.1
CardiffTirana
Score5049
Protected land share 50 km %1811
Landscape blanket share 50 km %153
Land share of disc %6883
Park area within 2 km88 hectares147 hectares
Good for families. Tirana leads by 20 points.20
CardiffTirana
Score3252
Tourist attractions within 2 km421
Park area within 2 km88 hectares147 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Tirana leads by 8 points.8
CardiffTirana
Score4553
Notable places within 2 km5183
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Tirana leads by 30 points.30
CardiffTirana
Score5484
Price level global84.942.6
Daily budget€76
Year-round weather. Tirana leads by 13 points.13
CardiffTirana
Score5467
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C11.6 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm43 mm to 172 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
Tirana
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Tirana
15
14
14
16
19
23
24
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Tirana
143
117
116
103
84
66
43
55
78
114
172
148
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Tirana
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Tirana
4
4
5
6
9
10
12
11
9
7
4
3

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). Tirana: 1961-1990 normals, Tirana (3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffTirana
AntalyaAYT
4 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 55 m
€150-169
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 55 m
€85-113
1 stop
BRS · 34 km
1 h 50 m
€33-74
TIA · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 30 m
€73-102
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
2 h 30 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
2 h 5 m
€68-80
TIA · 13 km
TurinTRN
1 h 55 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 55 m
€35-59
TIA · 13 km
PraguePRG
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
1 h 55 m
€90-115
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
PoznanPOZ
2 h 15 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 10 m
€88-118
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
2 h 25 m
€74-123
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
TIA · 13 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

MeasureCardiffTirana
Official languageEnglishAlbanian
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Lek (ALL)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation41 m110 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsTirana International Airport Mother Teresa (TIA)13 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffTirana
City population383,536389,323
People per km²2,7349,314
Museums within 10 km911
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5546
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 Tirana 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.