VacationSelector

Istanbul or Venice?

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 nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Venice
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration 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.

IstanbulVenice
Beaches & swimming. Venice leads by 26 points.26
IstanbulVenice
Score4369
Swim season months34
Beaches 10 km220
Coast distance0 km4 km
Water distance0 km4 km
Places to eat. Istanbul leads by 25 points.25
IstanbulVenice
Score7045
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,086750
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2010
Museums & heritage. Venice leads by 6 points.6
IstanbulVenice
Score6672
Museums within 10 km14557
Museums within 2 km of centre7145
Share of museums within 2 km %4979
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 44 points.44
IstanbulVenice
Score7935
Drinking venues within 4 km2,266342
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,176306
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5289
Nightclubs within 4 km2213
Nature & day trips. Istanbul leads by 8 points.8
IstanbulVenice
Score2517
Protected land share 50 km %14
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4870
Park area within 2 km60 hectares15 hectares
Good for families. Istanbul leads by 10 points.10
IstanbulVenice
Score6757
Tourist attractions within 2 km6872
Park area within 2 km60 hectares15 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Venice leads by 8 points.8
IstanbulVenice
Score7583
Notable places within 2 km285464
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 21 points.21
IstanbulVenice
Score8968
Price level global35.264.9
Daily budget€100€155
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 3 points.3
IstanbulVenice
Score6966
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C8 °C to 30.4 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm36 mm to 106 mm
Dry months42
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
Venice
8
10
15
19
24
28
30
30
25
19
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Venice
10
9
10
14
18
23
25
26
23
19
16
13
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Venice
38
36
54
78
91
75
65
74
106
89
95
60
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Venice
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Venice
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
9
6
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Venice: 1991-2020 normals, Treviso / S. Angelo (26.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulVenice
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
2 h 0 m
€46-119
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
1 h 40 m
€68-109
VCE · 7 km
BarcelonaBCN
3 h 15 m
€179-269
IST · 36 km
1 h 45 m
€41-56
VCE · 7 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
1 h 45 m
€190-215
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
5 h 55 m
€366-421
2 stops
VCE · 7 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€137-196
IST · 36 km
1 h 20 m
€136-186
1 stop
VCE · 7 km
MadridMAD
3 h 50 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
2 h 20 m
€102-159
VCE · 7 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 7 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
9 h 0 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
VCE · 7 km
CancunCUN
12 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
VRN · 113 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

MeasureIstanbulVenice
Official languageTurkishItalian
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m2 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsVenice Marco Polo Airport (VCE)7 km from centre98 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulVenice
City population15,655,924250,369
People per km²2,930602
Museums within 10 km7252
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre6246
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 Venice 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.