VacationSelector

Istanbul or Vienna?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Vienna
59
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

IstanbulVienna
Beaches & swimming. Istanbul leads by 43 points.43
IstanbulVienna
Score430
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km222
Coast distance0 km10,000 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Vienna leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulVienna
Score7077
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,0861,617
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2037
Museums & heritage. Vienna leads by 15 points.15
IstanbulVienna
Score6681
Museums within 10 km145192
Museums within 2 km of centre71110
Share of museums within 2 km %4957
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Istanbul leads by 5 points.5
IstanbulVienna
Score7974
Drinking venues within 4 km2,2661,948
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,1761,089
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5256
Nightclubs within 4 km221108
Nature & day trips. Vienna leads by 7 points.7
IstanbulVienna
Score2532
Protected land share 50 km %14
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %48100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares93 hectares
Good for families. Vienna leads by 2 points.2
IstanbulVienna
Score6769
Tourist attractions within 2 km6846
Park area within 2 km60 hectares93 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km24
Sights concentration. Istanbul and Vienna are level on 75.
IstanbulVienna
Score7575
Notable places within 2 km285287
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Istanbul leads by 30 points.30
IstanbulVienna
Score8959
Price level global35.276.9
Daily budget€100€160
Year-round weather. Istanbul leads by 8 points.8
IstanbulVienna
Score6961
Monthly daytime high9.2 °C to 29.7 °C3.3 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall23 mm to 101 mm38 mm to 80 mm
Dry months41
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
Vienna
3
6
11
17
21
25
27
27
21
15
9
4
Sea temperature, °C
Istanbul
9
8
9
11
16
21
23
24
22
19
15
12
Vienna
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Istanbul
74
74
66
47
29
29
23
29
43
85
79
101
Vienna
42
38
52
42
80
70
78
71
64
47
46
46
Daylight, hours per day
Istanbul
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Vienna
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Istanbul
3
3
5
6
9
10
11
10
7
5
4
2
Vienna
2
4
5
7
8
8
9
9
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Istanbul: 1991-2020 normals, Istanbul / Goztepe (9.9 km from centre). Vienna: 1991-2020 normals, Wien / Hohe Warte (4.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromIstanbulVienna
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 35 m
€110-186
IST · 36 km
2 h 10 m
€105-189
1 stop
VIE · 18 km
AntalyaAYT
1 h 15 m
€54-87
SAW · 30 km
2 h 40 m
€135-192
VIE · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 15 m
€141-223
IST · 36 km
1 h 55 m
€112-162
VIE · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€137-196
IST · 36 km
1 h 25 m
€143-152
VIE · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
4 h 15 m
€177-220
IST · 36 km
5 h 40 m
€292-307
VIE · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€161-174
IST · 36 km
1 h 50 m
€180-245
1 stop
VIE · 18 km
TehranIKA, THR
3 h 5 m
€261-292
IST · 36 km
4 h 25 m
no fares
VIE · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 5 m
€608-794
IST · 36 km
8 h 40 m
€736-786
1 stop
VIE · 18 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
9 h 30 m
€507-517
1 stop
IST · 36 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
VIE · 18 km
CancunCUN
12 h 55 m
no fares
IST · 36 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
VIE · 18 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

MeasureIstanbulVienna
Official languageTurkishGerman, Austrian Sign Language
CurrencyTurkish Lira (TRY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+3UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation100 m151 m
Main airportİstanbul Airport (IST)36 km from centre345 non-stop destinationsVienna International Airport (VIE)18 km from centre204 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureIstanbulVienna
City population15,655,9242,028,289
People per km²2,9304,890
Museums within 10 km72152
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre62113
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 Vienna 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.