VacationSelector

Geneva or Shanghai?

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

Your match

Geneva
50
match

Wins on nature & day trips and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Shanghai
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming 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.

GenevaShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
GenevaShanghai
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km430
Coast distance279 km18 km
Water distance18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 7 points.7
GenevaShanghai
Score5245
Museums within 10 km35108
Museums within 2 km of centre2028
Share of museums within 2 km %5726
Unesco sites within 50 km20
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 17 points.17
GenevaShanghai
Score5942
Protected land share 50 km %279
Landscape blanket share 50 km %210
Land share of disc %10082
Park area within 2 km182 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 16 points.16
GenevaShanghai
Score6581
Tourist attractions within 2 km2886
Park area within 2 km182 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km210
Sights concentration. Geneva leads by 5 points.5
GenevaShanghai
Score5651
Notable places within 2 km9973
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 44 points.44
GenevaShanghai
Score3579
Price level global110.549
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 6 points.6
GenevaShanghai
Score5965
Monthly daytime high5.1 °C to 26.8 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 94 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
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
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. Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGenevaShanghai
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
HGH · 149 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
MadridMAD
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€318-351
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
14 h 40 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

MeasureGenevaShanghai
Official languageFrench, German, Italian, RomanshPutonghua
CurrencySwiss Franc (CHF)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCJ230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation403 m4 m
Main airportGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureGenevaShanghai
City population209,06124,870,895
People per km²13,1483,922
Museums within 10 km3544
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre8064
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Geneva 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.