VacationSelector

Dubai or Seoul?

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

Your match

Dubai
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families 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.

DubaiSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 85 points.85
DubaiSeoul
Score10015
Swim season months122
Beaches 10 km521
Coast distance0 km28 km
Water distance0 km28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 19 points.19
DubaiSeoul
Score6685
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0863,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2632
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 45 points.45
DubaiSeoul
Score3883
Museums within 10 km26203
Museums within 2 km of centre1890
Share of museums within 2 km %6944
Unesco sites within 50 km05
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 27 points.27
DubaiSeoul
Score5380
Drinking venues within 4 km6013,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3061,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5150
Nightclubs within 4 km8429
Nature & day trips. Seoul leads by 14 points.14
DubaiSeoul
Score1832
Protected land share 50 km %41
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5295
Park area within 2 km13 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 30 points.30
DubaiSeoul
Score4979
Tourist attractions within 2 km3762
Park area within 2 km13 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km48
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 22 points.22
DubaiSeoul
Score3759
Notable places within 2 km33118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seoul leads by 3 points.3
DubaiSeoul
Score6972
Price level global63.459.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 5 points.5
DubaiSeoul
Score6661
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm18 mm to 422 mm
Dry months124
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
Dubai
25
26
29
34
38
41
42
42
40
36
31
27
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Dubai: 1991-2020 normals, Dubai International Airport (3.3 km from centre). Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiSeoul
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 5 m
€140-229
ICN · 49 km
OsakaKIX, ITM, UKB
9 h 35 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€139-234
ICN · 49 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
10 h 0 m
€493-591
ICN · 49 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
Hong KongHKG
7 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 5 m
€172-189
ICN · 49 km
Da NangDAD
7 h 10 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 10 m
€131-144
ICN · 49 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
8 h 15 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€197-199
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
6 h 25 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 0 m
€176-202
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
17 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
14 h 55 m
€1,052-1072
2 stops
ICN · 49 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

MeasureDubaiSeoul
Official languageArabicKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Won (KRW)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+9
Emergency number112Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation0 m38 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiSeoul
City population3,944,7519,668,465
People per km²15,973
Museums within 10 km1480
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km05
Distinct cuisines in the centre52156
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Seoul 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). 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.