VacationSelector

Istanbul or Melbourne?

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 sights concentration with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
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.

IstanbulMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 12 points.12
IstanbulMelbourne
Score4355
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km219
Coast distance0 km4 km
Water distance0 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
IstanbulMelbourne
Score7075
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2029
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 17 points.17
IstanbulMelbourne
Score6649
Museums within 10 km14542
Museums within 2 km of centre7124
Share of museums within 2 km %4957
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 5 points.5
IstanbulMelbourne
Score7974
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2661,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,1761,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5262
Nightclubs within 4 km221124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulMelbourne
Score2543
Protected land share 50 km %16
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4881
Park area within 2 km60 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulMelbourne
Score6760
Tourist attractions within 2 km6826
Park area within 2 km60 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulMelbourne
Score7557
Notable places within 2 km285103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 39 points.39
IstanbulMelbourne
Score8950
Price level global35.290.2
Daily budget€100
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulMelbourne
Score6976
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm45 mm to 69 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulMelbourne
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
12 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
10 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SydneySYD, WSI
18 h 15 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
9 h 15 m
€407-480
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
3 h 55 m
€271-275
IST · 36 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
13 h 35 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
10 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
10 h 20 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SantiagoSCL
16 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 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

MeasureIstanbulMelbourne
Official languageTurkishEnglish
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation100 m31 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulMelbourne
City population15,655,9245,350,705
People per km²2,930535
Museums within 10 km7242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre6286
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 Melbourne 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.