VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Hamburg?

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

Your match

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Hamburg
53
match

Wins on value for money 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.

EdinburghHamburg
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 55 points.55
EdinburghHamburg
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2016
Coast distance3 km22 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Hamburg leads by 3 points.3
EdinburghHamburg
Score7073
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0231,150
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3538
Museums & heritage. Hamburg leads by 3 points.3
EdinburghHamburg
Score5760
Museums within 10 km3094
Museums within 2 km of centre2250
Share of museums within 2 km %7353
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Hamburg leads by 4 points.4
EdinburghHamburg
Score6468
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1931,339
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884834
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7462
Nightclubs within 4 km65119
Nature & day trips. Hamburg leads by 5 points.5
EdinburghHamburg
Score3540
Protected land share 50 km %214
Landscape blanket share 50 km %110
Land share of disc %8599
Park area within 2 km166 hectares89 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 12 points.12
EdinburghHamburg
Score7260
Tourist attractions within 2 km8740
Park area within 2 km166 hectares89 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 1 points.1
EdinburghHamburg
Score6059
Notable places within 2 km126118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Hamburg leads by 6 points.6
EdinburghHamburg
Score5460
Price level global84.975.9
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Hamburg leads by 4 points.4
EdinburghHamburg
Score5155
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C4.3 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm39 mm to 82 mm
Dry months01
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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Hamburg
4
5
9
14
18
21
23
23
19
14
8
5
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Hamburg
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Hamburg
67
55
57
39
58
74
82
77
65
63
61
72
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Hamburg
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
Hamburg
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Hamburg: 1991-2020 normals, Hamburg Airport (9.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghHamburg
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
€89-225
HAM · 9 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
MunichMUC
2 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 20 m
€195-270
HAM · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 0 m
€201-242
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
3 h 0 m
€178-237
HAM · 9 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 35 m
€150-240
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
€167-214
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 35 m
€195-238
2 stops
EDI · 11 km
3 h 35 m
€162-200
HAM · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 30 m
€155-168
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
ZurichZRH
2 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 30 m
€216-237
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
6 h 25 m
€357-416
HAM · 9 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

MeasureEdinburghHamburg
Official languageEnglishGerman
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation47 m6 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsHamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM)9 km from centre119 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghHamburg
City population488,0501,910,160
People per km²1,8842,530
Museums within 10 km3277
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre7883
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Edinburgh or Hamburg 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.