VacationSelector

Kyoto or Los Angeles?

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

Your match

Kyoto
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
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.

KyotoLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Los Angeles leads by 12 points.12
KyotoLos Angeles
Score1729
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance47 km—
Water distance47 km—
Beaches 25 km—11
Warmest sea temp—20.2 °C
Scoring variant—beachScoreWideRing
Declared—2026-08-25
Register—seed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 18 points.18
KyotoLos Angeles
Score8466
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,0231,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2222
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 23 points.23
KyotoLos Angeles
Score7249
Museums within 10 km13269
Museums within 2 km of centre5123
Share of museums within 2 km %3933
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 26 points.26
KyotoLos Angeles
Score8054
Drinking venues within 4 km3,215660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,363432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7365
Nightclubs within 4 km2664
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 40 points.40
KyotoLos Angeles
Score2262
Protected land share 50 km %226
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %10080
Park area within 2 km45 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 33 points.33
KyotoLos Angeles
Score6633
Tourist attractions within 2 km6211
Park area within 2 km45 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 2 points.2
KyotoLos Angeles
Score5254
Notable places within 2 km7988
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 27 points.27
KyotoLos Angeles
Score7043
Price level global62.4100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 25 points.25
KyotoLos Angeles
Score6287
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months08
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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoLos Angeles
TokyoHND, NRT
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
11 h 0 m
€785-892
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
12 h 0 m
€570-646
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
10 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
HonoluluHNL
8 h 25 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
5 h 30 m
€295-319
LAX · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
5 h 35 m
€288-317
KIX · 81 km
16 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
10 h 10 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 19 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

MeasureKyotoLos Angeles
Official languageJapanese–
CurrencyYen (JPY)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119911
Elevation51 m106 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoLos Angeles
City population1,463,7233,898,747
People per km²1,7682,994
Museums within 10 km7638
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre8946
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Kyoto or Los Angeles 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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). 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.