VacationSelector

Cologne or Shanghai?

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 nature & day trips and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming 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.

CologneShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
CologneShanghai
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km400
Coast distance256 km18 km
Water distance18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Cologne leads by 15 points.15
CologneShanghai
Score6045
Museums within 10 km47108
Museums within 2 km of centre2728
Share of museums within 2 km %5726
Unesco sites within 50 km30
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 29 points.29
CologneShanghai
Score7142
Protected land share 50 km %539
Landscape blanket share 50 km %520
Land share of disc %10082
Park area within 2 km118 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 9 points.9
CologneShanghai
Score7281
Tourist attractions within 2 km4386
Park area within 2 km118 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km610
Sights concentration. Cologne leads by 2 points.2
CologneShanghai
Score5351
Notable places within 2 km8173
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 19 points.19
CologneShanghai
Score6079
Price level global75.949
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 5 points.5
CologneShanghai
Score6065
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 mm43 mm to 216 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
Cologne
6
7
12
16
20
23
25
25
21
15
10
7
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cologne: 1991-2020 normals, Köln-Stammheim (5.4 km from centre). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneShanghai
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€145-156
CGN · 15 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 35 m
€126-182
CGN · 15 km
10 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€77-159
CGN · 15 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 20 m
€81-121
CGN · 15 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 50 m
€203-369
1 stop
CGN · 15 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
HGH · 149 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 55 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 30 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 35 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 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

MeasureCologneShanghai
Official languageGermanPutonghua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation59 m4 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneShanghai
City population1,024,62124,870,895
People per km²2,5303,922
Museums within 10 km4044
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre8464
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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