VacationSelector

Chicago or Geneva?

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

Your match

Chicago
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Geneva
50
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

ChicagoGeneva
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 53 points.53
ChicagoGeneva
Score530
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1243
Coast distance10,000 km279 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoGeneva
Score8170
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,028
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3735
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoGeneva
Score4652
Museums within 10 km4535
Museums within 2 km of centre2020
Share of museums within 2 km %4457
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 12 points.12
ChicagoGeneva
Score6250
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123549
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728427
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6578
Nightclubs within 4 km5160
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 21 points.21
ChicagoGeneva
Score3859
Protected land share 50 km %627
Landscape blanket share 50 km %021
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km118 hectares182 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 10 points.10
ChicagoGeneva
Score5565
Tourist attractions within 2 km1828
Park area within 2 km118 hectares182 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 14 points.14
ChicagoGeneva
Score7056
Notable places within 2 km21799
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Chicago leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoGeneva
Score4335
Price level global100110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Geneva leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoGeneva
Score5759
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C5.1 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm55 mm to 94 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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoGeneva
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
LisbonLIS
8 h 15 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
2 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
6 h 25 m
€318-351
1 stop
GVA · 5 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

MeasureChicagoGeneva
Official languageFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m403 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoGeneva
City population2,746,388209,061
People per km²4,52913,148
Museums within 10 km4335
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre8780
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month

Where else could you go?

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