VacationSelector

Hamburg or Seattle?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Hamburg
53
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Seattle
52
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

HamburgSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 60 points.60
HamburgSeattle
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km16100
Coast distance22 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Seattle leads by 2 points.2
HamburgSeattle
Score7375
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,1501,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3835
Museums & heritage. Hamburg leads by 24 points.24
HamburgSeattle
Score6036
Museums within 10 km9428
Museums within 2 km of centre5017
Share of museums within 2 km %5361
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Hamburg leads by 11 points.11
HamburgSeattle
Score6857
Drinking venues within 4 km1,339873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre834696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6280
Nightclubs within 4 km11934
Nature & day trips. Hamburg and Seattle are level on 40.
HamburgSeattle
Score4040
Protected land share 50 km %149
Landscape blanket share 50 km %100
Land share of disc %9980
Park area within 2 km89 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Hamburg leads by 14 points.14
HamburgSeattle
Score6046
Tourist attractions within 2 km4017
Park area within 2 km89 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Hamburg leads by 7 points.7
HamburgSeattle
Score5952
Notable places within 2 km11876
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Hamburg leads by 17 points.17
HamburgSeattle
Score6043
Price level global75.9100
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Seattle leads by 6 points.6
HamburgSeattle
Score5561
Monthly daytime high4.3 °C to 23.2 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall39 mm to 82 mm15 mm to 160 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
Hamburg
4
5
9
14
18
21
23
23
19
14
8
5
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Hamburg
No coastline within reach
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Hamburg
67
55
57
39
58
74
82
77
65
63
61
72
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Hamburg
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Hamburg
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
2
1
Seattle
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Hamburg: 1991-2020 normals, Hamburg Airport (9.3 km from centre). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromHamburgSeattle
MunichMUC
1 h 20 m
€195-270
HAM · 9 km
10 h 40 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 10 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
10 h 20 m
€554-583
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€89-225
HAM · 9 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€178-237
HAM · 9 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 25 m
€357-416
HAM · 9 km
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€155-168
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 5 m
€337-378
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 15 m
€155-168
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€127-153
HAM · 9 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DublinDUB
1 h 55 m
no fares
HAM · 9 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
SEA · 18 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

MeasureHamburgSeattle
Official languageGerman
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation6 m40 m
Main airportHamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM)9 km from centre119 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureHamburgSeattle
City population1,910,160737,015
People per km²2,5301,996
Museums within 10 km7727
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8378
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Hamburg or Seattle 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.