VacationSelector

Galway or Shanghai?

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

Your match

Galway
39
match

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

Shanghai
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration 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.

GalwayShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Galway leads by 34 points.34
GalwayShanghai
Score5117
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km130
Coast distance1 km18 km
Water distance1 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 25 points.25
GalwayShanghai
Score2045
Museums within 10 km5108
Museums within 2 km of centre528
Share of museums within 2 km %10026
Unesco sites within 50 km00
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 13 points.13
GalwayShanghai
Score5542
Protected land share 50 km %—9
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8582
Park area within 2 km65 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 56 points.56
GalwayShanghai
Score2581
Tourist attractions within 2 km586
Park area within 2 km65 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km010
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 29 points.29
GalwayShanghai
Score2251
Notable places within 2 km1473
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 22 points.22
GalwayShanghai
Score5779
Price level global80.249
Daily budget€187—
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 11 points.11
GalwayShanghai
Score5465
Monthly daytime high8.9 °C to 19.6 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall63 mm to 113 mm43 mm to 216 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Galway
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
2
2
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGalwayShanghai
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 30 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BudapestBUD
3 h 5 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 30 m
no fares
NOC · 73 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MadridMAD
2 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
RomeFCO, CIA
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 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

MeasureGalwayShanghai
Official languageEnglish, IrishPutonghua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation25 m4 m
Main airportShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureGalwayShanghai
City population83,45624,870,895
People per km²1,5633,922
Museums within 10 km444
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre2564
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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