VacationSelector

Inverness or San Jose?

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

Your match

Inverness
25
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

San Jose
✓ Best match
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips and good for families 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.

InvernessSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Inverness leads by 20 points.20
InvernessSan Jose
Score288
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km11
Coast distance1 km14 km
Water distance1 km14 km
Places to eat. San Jose leads by 20 points.20
InvernessSan Jose
Score2141
Restaurants within 2 km of centre114313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1116
Museums & heritage. San Jose leads by 6 points.6
InvernessSan Jose
Score2026
Museums within 10 km620
Museums within 2 km of centre59
Share of museums within 2 km %8345
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. San Jose leads by 16 points.16
InvernessSan Jose
Score1531
Drinking venues within 4 km113231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre9888
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8738
Nightclubs within 4 km416
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 61 points.61
InvernessSan Jose
Score970
Protected land share 50 km %1226
Landscape blanket share 50 km %112
Land share of disc %8891
Park area within 2 km3 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. San Jose leads by 33 points.33
InvernessSan Jose
Score033
Tourist attractions within 2 km32
Park area within 2 km3 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Inverness leads by 10 points.10
InvernessSan Jose
Score2414
Notable places within 2 km169
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Inverness leads by 11 points.11
InvernessSan Jose
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 33 points.33
InvernessSan Jose
Score5285
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.9 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 72 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months18
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
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1
San Jose
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromInvernessSan Jose
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 50 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DublinDUB
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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

MeasureInvernessSan Jose
Official languageEnglish–
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation7 m25 m
Main airportInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureInvernessSan Jose
City population47,3801,013,240
People per km²2,2892,167
Museums within 10 km319
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre1530
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Inverness or San Jose 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). 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. 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.