VacationSelector

Cologne or Los Angeles?

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

Your match

Cologne
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
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.

CologneLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Los Angeles leads by 29 points.29
CologneLos Angeles
Score029
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km400
Coast distance256 km
Water distance
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Cologne leads by 6 points.6
CologneLos Angeles
Score7266
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1421,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3522
Museums & heritage. Cologne leads by 11 points.11
CologneLos Angeles
Score6049
Museums within 10 km4769
Museums within 2 km of centre2723
Share of museums within 2 km %5733
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Cologne leads by 10 points.10
CologneLos Angeles
Score6454
Drinking venues within 4 km1,107660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre727432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6665
Nightclubs within 4 km9064
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 9 points.9
CologneLos Angeles
Score7162
Protected land share 50 km %5326
Landscape blanket share 50 km %520
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km118 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Cologne leads by 39 points.39
CologneLos Angeles
Score7233
Tourist attractions within 2 km4311
Park area within 2 km118 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km62
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 1 points.1
CologneLos Angeles
Score5354
Notable places within 2 km8188
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cologne leads by 17 points.17
CologneLos Angeles
Score6043
Price level global75.9100
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 27 points.27
CologneLos Angeles
Score6087
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months08
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
Cologne
6
7
12
16
20
23
25
25
21
15
10
7
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cologne: 1991-2020 normals, Köln-Stammheim (5.4 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneLos Angeles
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€145-156
CGN · 15 km
13 h 35 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 35 m
€126-182
CGN · 15 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€77-159
CGN · 15 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 50 m
€203-369
1 stop
CGN · 15 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 55 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
12 h 40 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 35 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 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 2026-09 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

MeasureCologneLos Angeles
Official languageGerman
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation59 m106 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneLos Angeles
City population1,024,6213,898,747
People per km²2,5302,994
Museums within 10 km4038
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre8446
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cologne or Los Angeles 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.