VacationSelector

Chicago or London?

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 beaches & swimming with your weighting.

London
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on nightlife and museums & heritage 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.

ChicagoLondon
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 53 points.53
ChicagoLondon
Score530
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1247
Coast distance10,000 km43 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. London leads by 7 points.7
ChicagoLondon
Score8188
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1473,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3740
Museums & heritage. London leads by 26 points.26
ChicagoLondon
Score4672
Museums within 10 km45148
Museums within 2 km of centre2049
Share of museums within 2 km %4433
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. London leads by 33 points.33
ChicagoLondon
Score6295
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1235,327
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre7282,443
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6546
Nightclubs within 4 km51312
Nature & day trips. London leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoLondon
Score3840
Protected land share 50 km %616
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %10097
Park area within 2 km118 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 20 points.20
ChicagoLondon
Score5575
Tourist attractions within 2 km1885
Park area within 2 km118 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. London leads by 19 points.19
ChicagoLondon
Score7089
Notable places within 2 km217649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. London leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoLondon
Score4354
Price level global10084.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. London leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoLondon
Score5763
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm38 mm to 67 mm
Dry months01
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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
London
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
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). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoLondon
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
8 h 15 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
CancunCUN
3 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
Abu DhabiAUH
14 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 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

MeasureChicagoLondon
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation179 m4 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoLondon
City population2,746,3888,799,728
People per km²4,5295,598
Museums within 10 km43215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre87116
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 London 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.