VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Edinburgh
58
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on year-round weather and nightlife 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.

EdinburghMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh and Melbourne are level on 55.
EdinburghMelbourne
Score5555
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2019
Coast distance3 km4 km
Water distance3 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
EdinburghMelbourne
Score7075
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0231,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3529
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 8 points.8
EdinburghMelbourne
Score5749
Museums within 10 km3042
Museums within 2 km of centre2224
Share of museums within 2 km %7357
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
EdinburghMelbourne
Score6474
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1931,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre8841,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7462
Nightclubs within 4 km65124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 8 points.8
EdinburghMelbourne
Score3543
Protected land share 50 km %26
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %8581
Park area within 2 km166 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 12 points.12
EdinburghMelbourne
Score7260
Tourist attractions within 2 km8726
Park area within 2 km166 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 3 points.3
EdinburghMelbourne
Score6057
Notable places within 2 km126103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh leads by 4 points.4
EdinburghMelbourne
Score5450
Price level global84.990.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 25 points.25
EdinburghMelbourne
Score5176
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm45 mm to 69 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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghMelbourne
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 0 m
€201-242
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
7 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 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

MeasureEdinburghMelbourne
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999000
Elevation47 m31 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghMelbourne
City population488,0505,350,705
People per km²1,884535
Museums within 10 km3242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre7886
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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