VacationSelector

Geneva or Venice?

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 places to eat with your weighting.

Venice
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

The verdict

Choose Geneva if the trip is built around getting outside: protected countryside and parks close in, a wide range of kitchens and more places to drink after dark, with high summer the reliable window.

Choose Venice if you want a compact centre you can walk, roughly twice the museums, and water warm enough to swim in, peaking at 26°C in late summer.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

GenevaVenice
Beaches & swimming. Venice leads by 69 points.69
GenevaVenice
Score069
Swim season months04
Beaches 10 km4320
Coast distance279 km4 km
Water distance—4 km
Places to eat. Geneva leads by 25 points.25
GenevaVenice
Score7045
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,028750
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3510
Museums & heritage. Venice leads by 20 points.20
GenevaVenice
Score5272
Museums within 10 km3557
Museums within 2 km of centre2045
Share of museums within 2 km %5779
Unesco sites within 50 km25
Nightlife. Geneva leads by 15 points.15
GenevaVenice
Score5035
Drinking venues within 4 km549342
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre427306
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7889
Nightclubs within 4 km603
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 42 points.42
GenevaVenice
Score5917
Protected land share 50 km %274
Landscape blanket share 50 km %210
Land share of disc %10070
Park area within 2 km182 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 8 points.8
GenevaVenice
Score6557
Tourist attractions within 2 km2872
Park area within 2 km182 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Venice leads by 27 points.27
GenevaVenice
Score5683
Notable places within 2 km99464
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Venice leads by 33 points.33
GenevaVenice
Score3568
Price level global110.564.9
Daily budget€248€155
Year-round weather. Venice leads by 7 points.7
GenevaVenice
Score5966
Monthly daytime high5.1 °C to 26.8 °C8 °C to 30.4 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 94 mm36 mm to 106 mm
Dry months02
0255075100

Where they differ

Geneva is the one for getting out of the city: 27% of the land around it is protected against 4% around Venice, and there is far more park space near the centre. It also counts 43 beaches nearby against Venice's 20, though these are lake shores.

Venice has the swimmable water. Its sea is usable across a run of summer months and peaks at 26°C, where Geneva has no equivalent season in the water. Italy's national budget estimate is €155 against Switzerland's €248 a day.

Where they are alike

Both cities have a real winter and a warm summer: winter highs of 5°C and 8°C, rising to 27°C in Geneva and 30°C in Venice, with similar annual sunshine. Neither is a year-round warm-weather destination.

Both also work with children and after dark in the same modest way: attractions and parks near the centre, theme parks within reach, and drinking places clustered close enough that an evening out stays walkable.

Which traveller are you?

For a culture-led few days on foot, Venice: about twice as many museums as Geneva, clustered tightly around the centre, and 5 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Geneva's 2.

For walking and days out of town, Geneva: 27% of the surrounding land is protected, against a small fraction of the land around Venice, and there is far more park space near the centre.

For eating out and late evenings, Geneva again: a much wider range of kitchens, about twice as many places to drink and many times as many clubs, most of them close to the centre.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €248 for Switzerland and €155 for Italy, are national estimates of restaurant and hotel price levels rather than measurements of either city. A capital or a heavily visited city can sit further from its own country's average than these two figures sit from each other, so neither tells you what your trip will cost.

Geneva's 43 nearby beaches are lake shores, and no water temperature is recorded for them, so the count says nothing about how long the swimming season runs. In Venice, the warm weather runs on into early autumn, which is also the wettest part of the year at 106mm.

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
Venice
8
10
15
19
24
28
30
30
25
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Venice
10
9
10
14
18
23
25
26
23
19
16
13
Rainfall, mm
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Venice
38
36
54
78
91
75
65
74
106
89
95
60
Daylight, hours per day
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Venice
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2
Venice
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
9
6
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre). Venice: 1991-2020 normals, Treviso / S. Angelo (26.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Geneva is at its best from June to August, when highs reach 24-27°C and the lake is usable. Autumn is the wet stretch, with October near 94mm, and midwinter days peak around 5°C, so the shoulder months are thin.

Venice holds up over a longer season. May and June bring 24-28°C with the sea already swimmable, and September stays warm, though it is the wettest month at 106mm. January and February are the driest, near 36-38mm, but cold and quiet.

Getting there

Flying fromGenevaVenice
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
2 h 0 m
€46-119
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
1 h 40 m
€68-109
VCE · 7 km
MadridMAD
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
2 h 20 m
€102-159
VCE · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
1 h 45 m
€41-56
VCE · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
1 h 45 m
€190-215
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
2 h 55 m
€122-127
VCE · 7 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 55 m
€147-338
GVA · 5 km
2 h 20 m
€148-150
VCE · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€318-351
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
5 h 55 m
€366-421
2 stops
VCE · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 7 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 7 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

MeasureGenevaVenice
Official languageFrench, German, Italian, RomanshItalian
CurrencySwiss Franc (CHF)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCJ230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation403 m2 m
Main airportGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinationsVenice Marco Polo Airport (VCE)7 km from centre98 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureGenevaVenice
City population209,061250,369
People per km²13,148602
Museums within 10 km3552
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km25
Distinct cuisines in the centre8046
Swim season, months above 21 °C–4 months

Where else could you go?

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