VacationSelector

Istanbul or Kyoto?

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 beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on places to eat and museums & heritage 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.

IstanbulKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Istanbul leads by 26 points.26
IstanbulKyoto
Score4317
Swim season months35
Beaches 10 km20
Coast distance0 km47 km
Water distance0 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 14 points.14
IstanbulKyoto
Score7084
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0865,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2022
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 6 points.6
IstanbulKyoto
Score6672
Museums within 10 km145132
Museums within 2 km of centre7151
Share of museums within 2 km %4939
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 1 points.1
IstanbulKyoto
Score7980
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2663,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,1762,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5273
Nightclubs within 4 km22126
Nature & day trips. Istanbul leads by 3 points.3
IstanbulKyoto
Score2522
Protected land share 50 km %12
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %48100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 1 points.1
IstanbulKyoto
Score6766
Tourist attractions within 2 km6862
Park area within 2 km60 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 23 points.23
IstanbulKyoto
Score7552
Notable places within 2 km28579
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 19 points.19
IstanbulKyoto
Score8970
Price level global35.262.4
Daily budget€100—
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulKyoto
Score6962
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm40 mm to 232 mm
Dry months40
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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulKyoto
SeoulICN, GMP
10 h 0 m
€533-647
IST · 36 km
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
5 h 35 m
€288-317
KIX · 81 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
10 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
TehranIKA, THR
3 h 5 m
€261-292
IST · 36 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€137-196
IST · 36 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 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

MeasureIstanbulKyoto
Official languageTurkishJapanese
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+9
Emergency number112Police 110, fire 119
Elevation100 m51 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulKyoto
City population15,655,9241,463,723
People per km²2,9301,768
Museums within 10 km7276
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre6289
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Istanbul or Kyoto 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.