VacationSelector

Chicago or West Palm Beach?

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.

West Palm Beach
42
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Beaches & swimming. West Palm Beach leads by 35 points.35
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score5388
Swim season months112
Beaches 10 km1210
Coast distance10,000 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 44 points.44
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score8137
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,147262
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3714
Museums & heritage. Chicago leads by 29 points.29
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score4617
Museums within 10 km455
Museums within 2 km of centre203
Share of museums within 2 km %4460
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Chicago leads by 42 points.42
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score6220
Drinking venues within 4 km1,123132
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre72890
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6568
Nightclubs within 4 km5110
Nature & day trips. West Palm Beach leads by 31 points.31
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score3869
Protected land share 50 km %615
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km118 hectares34 hectares
Good for families. Chicago leads by 34 points.34
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score5521
Tourist attractions within 2 km183
Park area within 2 km118 hectares34 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 58 points.58
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score7012
Notable places within 2 km2178
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Chicago and West Palm Beach are level on 43.
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. West Palm Beach leads by 18 points.18
ChicagoWest Palm Beach
Score5775
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C24 °C to 32.5 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm67 mm to 217 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
West Palm Beach
24
25
26
28
30
32
32
33
31
30
27
25
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
West Palm Beach
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
West Palm Beach
86
67
84
92
126
214
145
217
199
147
88
78
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
West Palm Beach
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11

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). West Palm Beach: 1991-2020 normals, Palm Beach International (5.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoWest Palm Beach
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
1 h 45 m
€109-226
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 0 m
€195-265
1 stop
ORD · 25 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MadridMAD
8 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
9 h 0 m
€522-631
1 stop
MIA · 105 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
3 h 50 m
€253
ORD · 25 km
3 h 5 m
€278-290
MIA · 105 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
15 h 30 m
€891-1074
2 stops
MIA · 105 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

MeasureChicagoWest Palm Beach
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 m6 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsPresident Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT)6 km from centre37 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoWest Palm Beach
City population2,746,388117,415
People per km²4,529786
Museums within 10 km434
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8718
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month12 months

Where else could you go?

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