VacationSelector

Istanbul or Jakarta?

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

Your match

Istanbul
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Jakarta
54
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

IstanbulJakarta
Beaches & swimming. Jakarta leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulJakarta
Score4361
Swim season months312
Beaches 10 km25
Coast distance0 km8 km
Water distance0 km8 km
Places to eat. Istanbul leads by 14 points.14
IstanbulJakarta
Score7056
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,086908
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2016
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 38 points.38
IstanbulJakarta
Score6628
Museums within 10 km14526
Museums within 2 km of centre7110
Share of museums within 2 km %4938
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 22 points.22
IstanbulJakarta
Score7957
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2661,046
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176372
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5236
Nightclubs within 4 km22110
Nature & day trips. Jakarta leads by 29 points.29
IstanbulJakarta
Score2554
Protected land share 50 km %1
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4872
Park area within 2 km60 hectares56 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 34 points.34
IstanbulJakarta
Score6733
Tourist attractions within 2 km682
Park area within 2 km60 hectares56 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 28 points.28
IstanbulJakarta
Score7547
Notable places within 2 km28558
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Jakarta leads by 4 points.4
IstanbulJakarta
Score8993
Price level global35.229.9
Daily budget€100
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 8 points.8
IstanbulJakarta
Score6961
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C30.5 °C to 33.3 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm39 mm to 360 mm
Dry months41
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
Istanbul
9
10
12
17
22
27
30
30
26
21
16
11
Jakarta
31
31
32
33
33
32
32
33
33
33
33
32
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Jakarta
29
29
29
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
30
29
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Jakarta
355
360
197
160
102
70
85
39
56
99
128
210
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Jakarta
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Jakarta
3
3
4
5
5
4
5
6
6
6
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Jakarta: 1991-2020 normals, Jakarta / Observatory (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulJakarta
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
12 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 50 m
€129-136
CGK · 20 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
10 h 30 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 0 m
€120-134
CGK · 20 km
JeddahJED
3 h 30 m
€173-178
IST · 36 km
10 h 5 m
€493-631
CGK · 20 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
3 h 20 m
€217-232
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
8 h 20 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
10 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
SeoulICN, GMP
10 h 0 m
€533-647
IST · 36 km
6 h 50 m
€227-241
CGK · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
14 h 0 m
€508-593
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
MedinaMED
3 h 10 m
€180-200
IST · 36 km
10 h 5 m
€550-674
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 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

MeasureIstanbulJakarta
Official languageTurkishIndonesian
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Rupiah (IDR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+7
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m91 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsSoekarno-Hatta International Airport (CGK)20 km from centre90 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulJakarta
City population15,655,92411,135,191
People per km²2,93016,821
Museums within 10 km7244
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre6235
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Istanbul or Jakarta 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. 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). 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 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.