VacationSelector

Chicago or Lyon?

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.

Lyon
52
match

Wins on value for money 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.

ChicagoLyon
Beaches & swimming. Chicago leads by 53 points.53
ChicagoLyon
Score530
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1226
Coast distance10,000 km253 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoLyon
Score8179
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3740
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoLyon
Score4655
Museums within 10 km4553
Museums within 2 km of centre2025
Share of museums within 2 km %4447
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoLyon
Score6258
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6571
Nightclubs within 4 km5147
Nature & day trips. Chicago leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoLyon
Score3833
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %06
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km118 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoLyon
Score5559
Tourist attractions within 2 km1825
Park area within 2 km118 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 16 points.16
ChicagoLyon
Score7054
Notable places within 2 km21786
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 19 points.19
ChicagoLyon
Score4362
Price level global10073.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 7 points.7
ChicagoLyon
Score5764
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm43 mm to 101 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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
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). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoLyon
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
2 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 35 m
€446-565
1 stop
LYS · 20 km
LisbonLIS
8 h 15 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
8 h 50 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
9 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
Abu DhabiAUH
14 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
GVA · 111 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

MeasureChicagoLyon
Official languageFrench
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m160 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoLyon
City population2,746,388519,127
People per km²4,52910,838
Museums within 10 km4342
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre87148
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 Lyon 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.