VacationSelector

Chicago or Venice?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Chicago
56
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Venice
57
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money 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.

ChicagoVenice
Beaches & swimming. Venice leads by 16 points.16
ChicagoVenice
Score5369
Swim season months14
Beaches 10 km1220
Coast distance10,000 km4 km
Water distance1 km4 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 36 points.36
ChicagoVenice
Score8145
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,147750
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3710
Museums & heritage. Venice leads by 26 points.26
ChicagoVenice
Score4672
Museums within 10 km4557
Museums within 2 km of centre2045
Share of museums within 2 km %4479
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 27 points.27
ChicagoVenice
Score6235
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123342
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728306
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6589
Nightclubs within 4 km513
Nature & day trips. Chicago leads by 21 points.21
ChicagoVenice
Score3817
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10070
Park area within 2 km118 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Venice leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoVenice
Score5557
Tourist attractions within 2 km1872
Park area within 2 km118 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Venice leads by 13 points.13
ChicagoVenice
Score7083
Notable places within 2 km217464
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Venice leads by 25 points.25
ChicagoVenice
Score4368
Price level global10064.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Venice leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoVenice
Score5766
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C8 °C to 30.4 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm36 mm to 106 mm
Dry months02
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
Venice
8
10
15
19
24
28
30
30
25
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Venice
10
9
10
14
18
23
25
26
23
19
16
13
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Venice
38
36
54
78
91
75
65
74
106
89
95
60
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Venice
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Venice
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
9
6
4
3
3

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). Venice: 1991-2020 normals, Treviso / S. Angelo (26.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoVenice
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€68-109
VCE · 7 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 0 m
€46-119
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 7 km
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
€102-159
VCE · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 45 m
€41-56
VCE · 7 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 45 m
€190-215
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
RomeFCO, CIA
9 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
€81-119
VCE · 7 km
CancunCUN
3 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
VRN · 113 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
5 h 55 m
€366-421
2 stops
VCE · 7 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

MeasureChicagoVenice
Official languageItalian
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m2 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsVenice Marco Polo Airport (VCE)7 km from centre98 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoVenice
City population2,746,388250,369
People per km²4,529602
Museums within 10 km4352
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre8746
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 Venice 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.