VacationSelector

Chicago or Tampa?

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 sights concentration and places to eat with your weighting.

Tampa
44
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.

ChicagoTampa
Beaches & swimming. Tampa leads by 22 points.22
ChicagoTampa
Score5375
Swim season months18
Beaches 10 km1210
Coast distance10,000 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 27 points.27
ChicagoTampa
Score8154
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,147359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3731
Museums & heritage. Chicago leads by 19 points.19
ChicagoTampa
Score4627
Museums within 10 km4513
Museums within 2 km of centre2010
Share of museums within 2 km %4477
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 23 points.23
ChicagoTampa
Score6239
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123324
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728227
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6570
Nightclubs within 4 km5126
Nature & day trips. Chicago leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoTampa
Score3830
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10072
Park area within 2 km118 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 25 points.25
ChicagoTampa
Score5530
Tourist attractions within 2 km183
Park area within 2 km118 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 49 points.49
ChicagoTampa
Score7021
Notable places within 2 km21713
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Chicago and Tampa are level on 43.
ChicagoTampa
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Tampa leads by 18 points.18
ChicagoTampa
Score5775
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C21.5 °C to 32.6 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm36 mm to 228 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
Tampa
22
23
25
28
31
32
32
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Tampa
18
18
20
23
26
28
30
30
29
27
23
20
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Tampa
66
66
64
64
67
187
197
228
156
60
36
65
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Tampa
11
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Tampa
7
7
9
10
11
10
9
10
8
8
7
7

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). Tampa: 1991-2020 normals, Tampa International Airport (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoTampa
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
2 h 35 m
€178-237
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
Punta CanaPUJ
4 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
MCO · 125 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

MeasureChicagoTampa
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation179 m30 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsTampa International Airport (TPA)8 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoTampa
City population2,746,388384,959
People per km²4,529848
Museums within 10 km436
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8747
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 Tampa 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.