VacationSelector

Chicago or Monaco?

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 nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Monaco
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

ChicagoMonaco
Beaches & swimming. Monaco leads by 20 points.20
ChicagoMonaco
Score5373
Swim season months14
Beaches 10 km1250
Coast distance10,000 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 42 points.42
ChicagoMonaco
Score8139
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,147269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3716
Museums & heritage. Chicago leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoMonaco
Score4638
Museums within 10 km4523
Museums within 2 km of centre208
Share of museums within 2 km %4435
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 54 points.54
ChicagoMonaco
Score628
Drinking venues within 4 km1,12369
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre72863
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6591
Nightclubs within 4 km517
Nature & day trips. Monaco leads by 15 points.15
ChicagoMonaco
Score3853
Protected land share 50 km %624
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %10054
Park area within 2 km118 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 20 points.20
ChicagoMonaco
Score5535
Tourist attractions within 2 km1814
Park area within 2 km118 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoMonaco
Score7064
Notable places within 2 km217154
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for moneyNo source publishes a price level for Monaco.
Year-round weather. Monaco leads by 17 points.17
ChicagoMonaco
Score5774
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C13.3 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm13 mm to 138 mm
Dry months03
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
Monaco
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Monaco
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
22
20
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Monaco
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Monaco
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Monaco
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
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). Monaco: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (19.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoMonaco
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 18 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
2 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
7 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
9 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 18 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€155-228
1 stop
NCE · 18 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
7 h 50 m
no fares
NCE · 18 km
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 50 m
€137-165
NCE · 18 km
Abu DhabiAUH
14 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
6 h 20 m
no fares
NCE · 18 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

MeasureChicagoMonaco
Official languageFrench
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCEF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m68 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)18 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoMonaco
City population2,746,38838,857
People per km²4,52918,503
Museums within 10 km4314
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre8729
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month4 months

Where else could you go?

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