VacationSelector

Ghent or Sofia?

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

Your match

Ghent
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Sofia
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on value for money and nature & day trips 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.

GhentSofia
Beaches & swimming. Ghent leads by 26 points.26
GhentSofia
Score260
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km80
Coast distance32 km214 km
Water distance32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 6 points.6
GhentSofia
Score7064
Restaurants within 2 km of centre764845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4928
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 1 points.1
GhentSofia
Score5857
Museums within 10 km2451
Museums within 2 km of centre2040
Share of museums within 2 km %8378
Unesco sites within 50 km51
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 12 points.12
GhentSofia
Score4961
Drinking venues within 4 km570958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre446608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7863
Nightclubs within 4 km26102
Nature & day trips. Sofia leads by 17 points.17
GhentSofia
Score3451
Protected land share 50 km %712
Landscape blanket share 50 km %44
Land share of disc %87100
Park area within 2 km84 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Sofia leads by 5 points.5
GhentSofia
Score5055
Tourist attractions within 2 km1920
Park area within 2 km84 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 11 points.11
GhentSofia
Score4657
Notable places within 2 km55104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 39 points.39
GhentSofia
Score6099
Price level global76.221.4
Daily budget€180€77
Year-round weather. Sofia leads by 8 points.8
GhentSofia
Score5664
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months13
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGhentSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 8 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 56 km
1 h 35 m
€74-99
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 56 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
€87-136
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 56 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
SOF · 8 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 56 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 8 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
4 h 45 m
€298-357
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
11 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
10 h 0 m
€614-660
2 stops
SOF · 8 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

MeasureGhentSofia
Official languageFrench, German, DutchBulgarian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation12 m560 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureGhentSofia
City population272,6571,213,134
People per km²1,7282,466
Museums within 10 km3042
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km51
Distinct cuisines in the centre8351
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Ghent or Sofia 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. 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.