VacationSelector

Istanbul or Singapore?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Istanbul
65
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Singapore
✓ Best match
68
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat 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.

IstanbulSingapore
Beaches & swimming. Singapore leads by 57 points.57
IstanbulSingapore
Score43100
Swim season months312
Beaches 10 km242
Coast distance0 km2 km
Water distance0 km2 km
Places to eat. Singapore leads by 17 points.17
IstanbulSingapore
Score7087
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0864,115
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2031
Museums & heritage. Istanbul leads by 16 points.16
IstanbulSingapore
Score6650
Museums within 10 km14557
Museums within 2 km of centre7126
Share of museums within 2 km %4946
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 5 points.5
IstanbulSingapore
Score7974
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2661,973
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,1761,393
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5271
Nightclubs within 4 km22177
Nature & day trips. Singapore leads by 9 points.9
IstanbulSingapore
Score2534
Protected land share 50 km %11
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4853
Park area within 2 km60 hectares156 hectares
Good for families. Singapore leads by 1 points.1
IstanbulSingapore
Score6768
Tourist attractions within 2 km6828
Park area within 2 km60 hectares156 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Istanbul leads by 9 points.9
IstanbulSingapore
Score7566
Notable places within 2 km285172
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 19 points.19
IstanbulSingapore
Score8970
Price level global35.262
Daily budget€100—
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulSingapore
Score6962
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C30.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm109 mm to 329 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
Singapore
31
31
32
32
32
32
31
31
32
32
31
31
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Singapore
28
28
29
30
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
29
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Singapore
227
109
151
165
163
139
145
149
124
167
253
329
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Singapore
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Singapore
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
5
5
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Singapore: 1991-2020 normals, Singapore / Changi Airport (17 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulSingapore
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
13 h 30 m
€463-619
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
10 h 30 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 0 m
€85-88
SIN · 17 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
6 h 55 m
€310-338
SIN · 17 km
SeoulICN, GMP
10 h 0 m
€533-647
IST · 36 km
6 h 5 m
€240-286
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
13 h 15 m
no fares
SIN · 17 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
12 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 40 m
€188-241
SIN · 17 km
JakartaCGK, HLP
11 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 40 m
€145-152
SIN · 17 km
JeddahJED
3 h 30 m
€173-178
IST · 36 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SIN · 17 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
2 h 20 m
€157-169
SIN · 17 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
18 h 45 m
€835
SIN · 17 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

MeasureIstanbulSingapore
Official languageTurkishEnglish, Tamil, Malay, Standard Chinese
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Singapore Dollar (SGD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+8
Emergency number112Police 999, ambulance 995, fire 995
Elevation100 m21 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsSingapore Changi Airport (SIN)17 km from centre165 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulSingapore
City population15,655,9245,866,139
People per km²2,9308,158
Museums within 10 km7240
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre62107
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months12 months

Where else could you go?

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