VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Seoul?

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

Your match

Edinburgh
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money 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.

EdinburghSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 40 points.40
EdinburghSeoul
Score5515
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km201
Coast distance3 km28 km
Water distance3 km28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 15 points.15
EdinburghSeoul
Score7085
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0233,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3532
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 26 points.26
EdinburghSeoul
Score5783
Museums within 10 km30203
Museums within 2 km of centre2290
Share of museums within 2 km %7344
Unesco sites within 50 km35
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 16 points.16
EdinburghSeoul
Score6480
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1933,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre8841,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7450
Nightclubs within 4 km6529
Nature & day trips. Edinburgh leads by 3 points.3
EdinburghSeoul
Score3532
Protected land share 50 km %21
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %8595
Park area within 2 km166 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 7 points.7
EdinburghSeoul
Score7279
Tourist attractions within 2 km8762
Park area within 2 km166 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km08
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 1 points.1
EdinburghSeoul
Score6059
Notable places within 2 km126118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seoul leads by 18 points.18
EdinburghSeoul
Score5472
Price level global84.959.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Seoul leads by 10 points.10
EdinburghSeoul
Score5161
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm18 mm to 422 mm
Dry months04
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
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
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. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghSeoul
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
11 h 55 m
€680-750
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 20 m
€75-101
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 55 m
€99-141
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
11 h 15 m
€632-735
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 0 m
€201-242
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
10 h 0 m
€493-591
ICN · 49 km
ViennaVIE
2 h 35 m
€150-240
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
PraguePRG
2 h 15 m
€135-214
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
MadridMAD
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
12 h 25 m
no fares
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

MeasureEdinburghSeoul
Official languageEnglishKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Won (KRW)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number112 or 999Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation47 m38 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghSeoul
City population488,0509,668,465
People per km²1,88415,973
Museums within 10 km3280
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km35
Distinct cuisines in the centre78156
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

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