VacationSelector

Istanbul or Los Angeles?

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 value for money and good for families with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

IstanbulLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Istanbul leads by 14 points.14
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score4329
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km20
Coast distance0 km
Water distance0 km
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Istanbul leads by 4 points.4
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score7066
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2022
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 17 points.17
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score6649
Museums within 10 km14569
Museums within 2 km of centre7123
Share of museums within 2 km %4933
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 25 points.25
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score7954
Drinking venues within 4 km2,266660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5265
Nightclubs within 4 km22164
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 37 points.37
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score2562
Protected land share 50 km %126
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4880
Park area within 2 km60 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 34 points.34
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score6733
Tourist attractions within 2 km6811
Park area within 2 km60 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 21 points.21
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score7554
Notable places within 2 km28588
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 46 points.46
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score8943
Price level global35.2100
Daily budget€100
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulLos Angeles
Score6987
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months48
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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulLos Angeles
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
13 h 20 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
11 h 0 m
€785-892
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
12 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
DenverDEN, APA
12 h 15 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
JeddahJED
3 h 30 m
€173-178
IST · 36 km
16 h 25 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
14 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 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

MeasureIstanbulLos Angeles
Official languageTurkish
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation100 m106 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulLos Angeles
City population15,655,9243,898,747
People per km²2,9302,994
Museums within 10 km7238
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre6246
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Istanbul or Los Angeles 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.