VacationSelector

Istanbul or Nice?

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 good for families and nightlife with your weighting.

Nice
56
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.

IstanbulNice
Beaches & swimming. Nice leads by 30 points.30
IstanbulNice
Score4373
Swim season months34
Beaches 10 km270
Coast distance0 km1 km
Water distance0 km1 km
Places to eat. Istanbul leads by 1 points.1
IstanbulNice
Score7069
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,231
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2028
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 20 points.20
IstanbulNice
Score6646
Museums within 10 km14527
Museums within 2 km of centre7114
Share of museums within 2 km %4952
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 35 points.35
IstanbulNice
Score7944
Drinking venues within 4 km2,266428
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176388
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5291
Nightclubs within 4 km22126
Nature & day trips. Nice leads by 32 points.32
IstanbulNice
Score2557
Protected land share 50 km %124
Landscape blanket share 50 km %020
Land share of disc %4862
Park area within 2 km60 hectares56 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 37 points.37
IstanbulNice
Score6730
Tourist attractions within 2 km684
Park area within 2 km60 hectares56 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 28 points.28
IstanbulNice
Score7547
Notable places within 2 km28560
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 27 points.27
IstanbulNice
Score8962
Price level global35.273.7
Daily budget€100€160
Year-round weather. Nice leads by 5 points.5
IstanbulNice
Score6974
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C13.3 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm13 mm to 138 mm
Dry months43
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
Nice
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Nice
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
22
20
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Nice
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Nice
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Nice
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
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). Nice: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulNice
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 6 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 6 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
6 h 20 m
€375-433
NCE · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 6 km
BarcelonaBCN
3 h 15 m
€179-269
IST · 36 km
1 h 15 m
€83-135
NCE · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€137-196
IST · 36 km
1 h 30 m
€164-246
1 stop
NCE · 6 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 15 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 6 km
GenevaGVA
2 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 0 m
€65-145
NCE · 6 km
BerlinBER
2 h 40 m
€125-140
IST · 36 km
1 h 55 m
€116-156
NCE · 6 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 6 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

MeasureIstanbulNice
Official languageTurkishFrench
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m0 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)6 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulNice
City population15,655,924357,737
People per km²2,9304,975
Museums within 10 km7216
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre6265
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months4 months

Where else could you go?

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