VacationSelector

Chicago or Hong Kong?

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

Your match

Chicago
56
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

Hong Kong
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

ChicagoHong Kong
Beaches & swimming. Hong Kong leads by 34 points.34
ChicagoHong Kong
Score5387
Swim season months18
Beaches 10 km1265
Coast distance10,000 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Hong Kong leads by 7 points.7
ChicagoHong Kong
Score8188
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1474,325
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3732
Museums & heritage. Chicago leads by 10 points.10
ChicagoHong Kong
Score4636
Museums within 10 km4550
Museums within 2 km of centre2017
Share of museums within 2 km %4434
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Hong Kong leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoHong Kong
Score6271
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1231,948
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre7281,154
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6559
Nightclubs within 4 km5137
Nature & day trips. Hong Kong leads by 26 points.26
ChicagoHong Kong
Score3864
Protected land share 50 km %68
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10029
Park area within 2 km118 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Hong Kong leads by 3 points.3
ChicagoHong Kong
Score5558
Tourist attractions within 2 km1827
Park area within 2 km118 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 1 points.1
ChicagoHong Kong
Score7069
Notable places within 2 km217204
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Hong Kong leads by 20 points.20
ChicagoHong Kong
Score4363
Price level global10072
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Hong Kong leads by 17 points.17
ChicagoHong Kong
Score5774
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C19.4 °C to 31.3 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm23 mm to 493 mm
Dry months04
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
Hong Kong
19
20
22
26
29
30
31
31
31
28
25
21
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Hong Kong
20
20
21
23
26
28
29
29
28
27
24
21
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Hong Kong
23
39
70
144
280
493
381
453
331
92
36
31
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Hong Kong
11
11
12
13
13
14
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Hong Kong
5
3
3
4
5
5
7
6
6
6
6
5

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). Hong Kong: 1991-2020 normals, King's Park (4.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoHong Kong
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
4 h 5 m
€279-371
HKG · 25 km
SeoulICN, GMP
13 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
3 h 5 m
€168-188
HKG · 25 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
15 h 55 m
no fares
HKG · 25 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
HKG · 25 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
17 h 15 m
no fares
SZX · 54 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
HKG · 25 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
15 h 45 m
no fares
HKG · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
11 h 55 m
€586-713
1 stop
HKG · 25 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 10 m
€187-223
ORD · 25 km
16 h 0 m
no fares
HKG · 25 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 40 m
€472-535
1 stop
HKG · 25 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

MeasureChicagoHong Kong
Official languageStandard Chinese
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzG220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number911999
Elevation179 m7 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsHong Kong International Airport (HKG)25 km from centre151 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days17 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoHong Kong
City population2,746,3887,413,070
People per km²4,529
Museums within 10 km4339
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8776
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month8 months

Where else could you go?

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