VacationSelector

Cologne or Tirana?

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

Tirana
51
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.

CologneTirana
Beaches & swimming. Tirana leads by 17 points.17
CologneTirana
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km400
Coast distance256 km26 km
Water distance26 km
Places to eat. Cologne leads by 17 points.17
CologneTirana
Score7255
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,142572
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3522
Museums & heritage. Cologne leads by 35 points.35
CologneTirana
Score6025
Museums within 10 km4712
Museums within 2 km of centre278
Share of museums within 2 km %5767
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Cologne leads by 6 points.6
CologneTirana
Score6458
Drinking venues within 4 km1,107945
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre727683
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6672
Nightclubs within 4 km9029
Nature & day trips. Cologne leads by 22 points.22
CologneTirana
Score7149
Protected land share 50 km %5311
Landscape blanket share 50 km %523
Land share of disc %10083
Park area within 2 km118 hectares147 hectares
Good for families. Cologne leads by 20 points.20
CologneTirana
Score7252
Tourist attractions within 2 km4321
Park area within 2 km118 hectares147 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km60
Sights concentration. Cologne and Tirana are level on 53.
CologneTirana
Score5353
Notable places within 2 km8183
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Tirana leads by 24 points.24
CologneTirana
Score6084
Price level global75.942.6
Daily budget€163€76
Year-round weather. Tirana leads by 7 points.7
CologneTirana
Score6067
Monthly daytime high6.3 °C to 25 °C11.6 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall48 mm to 81 mm43 mm to 172 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
Tirana
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cologne
No coastline within reach
Tirana
15
14
14
16
19
23
24
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cologne
64
56
53
48
60
76
81
81
67
65
68
72
Tirana
143
117
116
103
84
66
43
55
78
114
172
148
Daylight, hours per day
Cologne
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Tirana
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cologne
2
2
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
3
2
1
Tirana
4
4
5
6
9
10
12
11
9
7
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cologne: 1991-2020 normals, Köln-Stammheim (5.4 km from centre). Tirana: 1961-1990 normals, Tirana (3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCologneTirana
AntalyaAYT
3 h 30 m
€204-239
1 stop
CGN · 15 km
1 h 55 m
€150-169
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€145-156
CGN · 15 km
1 h 35 m
€100-109
TIA · 13 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
2 h 55 m
€62-138
TIA · 13 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 35 m
€126-182
CGN · 15 km
1 h 35 m
€150-202
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 20 m
€81-121
CGN · 15 km
1 h 50 m
€33-74
TIA · 13 km
MunichMUC
1 h 10 m
no fares
CGN · 15 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€77-159
CGN · 15 km
2 h 25 m
€74-123
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
2 h 30 m
€73-102
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
4 h 20 m
no fares
DUS · 41 km
2 h 40 m
€222-261
TIA · 13 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

MeasureCologneTirana
Official languageGermanAlbanian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Lek (ALL)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation59 m110 m
Main airportCologne Bonn Airport (CGN)15 km from centre113 non-stop destinationsTirana International Airport Mother Teresa (TIA)13 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCologneTirana
City population1,024,621389,323
People per km²2,5309,314
Museums within 10 km4011
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre8446
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 Tirana 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.