VacationSelector

Istanbul or Stockholm?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Stockholm
62
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

IstanbulStockholm
Beaches & swimming. Stockholm leads by 17 points.17
IstanbulStockholm
Score4360
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km273
Coast distance0 km0 km
Water distance0 km0 km
Places to eat. Stockholm leads by 6 points.6
IstanbulStockholm
Score7076
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,558
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2036
Museums & heritage. Stockholm leads by 3 points.3
IstanbulStockholm
Score6669
Museums within 10 km14574
Museums within 2 km of centre7147
Share of museums within 2 km %4964
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 15 points.15
IstanbulStockholm
Score7964
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2661,090
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176689
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5263
Nightclubs within 4 km221106
Nature & day trips. Stockholm leads by 16 points.16
IstanbulStockholm
Score2541
Protected land share 50 km %17
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4877
Park area within 2 km60 hectares104 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 10 points.10
IstanbulStockholm
Score6757
Tourist attractions within 2 km6823
Park area within 2 km60 hectares104 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Stockholm leads by 4 points.4
IstanbulStockholm
Score7579
Notable places within 2 km285357
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 32 points.32
IstanbulStockholm
Score8957
Price level global35.280.3
Daily budget€100€169
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 16 points.16
IstanbulStockholm
Score6953
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C1 °C to 23.6 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm27 mm to 66 mm
Dry months45
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
Stockholm
1
1
5
11
17
21
24
22
17
10
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Stockholm
3
2
2
3
7
12
16
17
14
10
7
5
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Stockholm
37
29
27
29
34
61
60
66
53
51
47
47
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Stockholm
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Stockholm
1
2
5
7
9
9
9
8
6
3
1
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Stockholm: 1991-2020 normals, Stockholm Observatoriet (26.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulStockholm
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
2 h 25 m
€89-139
ARN · 36 km
CopenhagenCPH
3 h 5 m
no fares
SAW · 30 km
1 h 20 m
€84-99
ARN · 36 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
2 h 0 m
€153-185
ARN · 36 km
OsloOSL, TRF
3 h 30 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 5 m
€77-102
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
HelsinkiHEL
3 h 10 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
1 h 10 m
€66-74
ARN · 36 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
2 h 30 m
€91-121
ARN · 36 km
AntalyaAYT
1 h 15 m
€54-87
SAW · 30 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
6 h 20 m
€330-429
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
10 h 25 m
€526-560
1 stop
ARN · 36 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

MeasureIstanbulStockholm
Official languageTurkishSwedish
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Swedish Krona (SEK)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m22 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsStockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)36 km from centre172 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulStockholm
City population15,655,924984,748
People per km²2,9305,260
Museums within 10 km72266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre6281
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 Stockholm 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.