VacationSelector

Istanbul or Santiago?

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.

Santiago
55
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.

IstanbulSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Istanbul leads by 43 points.43
IstanbulSantiago
Score430
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km20
Coast distance0 km89 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 2 points.2
IstanbulSantiago
Score7072
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2032
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 21 points.21
IstanbulSantiago
Score6645
Museums within 10 km14587
Museums within 2 km of centre7130
Share of museums within 2 km %4934
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulSantiago
Score7961
Drinking venues within 4 km2,266912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5259
Nightclubs within 4 km221112
Nature & day trips. Santiago leads by 27 points.27
IstanbulSantiago
Score2552
Protected land share 50 km %117
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %48100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 18 points.18
IstanbulSantiago
Score6749
Tourist attractions within 2 km6812
Park area within 2 km60 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 27 points.27
IstanbulSantiago
Score7548
Notable places within 2 km28562
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 8 points.8
IstanbulSantiago
Score8981
Price level global35.246.2
Daily budget€100
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 16 points.16
IstanbulSantiago
Score6985
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm0 mm to 87 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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulSantiago
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
15 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 0 m
€140-179
SCL · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
13 h 5 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
3 h 45 m
€267-313
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
BogotaBOG
13 h 15 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
5 h 40 m
€340-367
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
3 h 15 m
€179-269
IST · 36 km
13 h 45 m
€774-838
2 stops
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
3 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
11 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
SydneySYD, WSI
18 h 15 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
14 h 0 m
€1,325-1342
1 stop
SCL · 14 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

MeasureIstanbulSantiago
Official languageTurkishSpanish
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number112Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation100 m575 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulSantiago
City population15,655,9246,257,516
People per km²2,9307,468
Museums within 10 km7254
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre6264
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months

Where else could you go?

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