VacationSelector

Kyoto or Lucerne?

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 nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Wins on 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.

KyotoLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoLucerne
Score170
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km016
Coast distance47 km669 km
Water distance47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 37 points.37
KyotoLucerne
Score8447
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,023269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2225
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 32 points.32
KyotoLucerne
Score7240
Museums within 10 km13223
Museums within 2 km of centre5113
Share of museums within 2 km %3957
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 52 points.52
KyotoLucerne
Score8028
Drinking venues within 4 km3,215202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,363151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7375
Nightclubs within 4 km2611
Nature & day trips. Lucerne leads by 3 points.3
KyotoLucerne
Score2225
Protected land share 50 km %27
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km45 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 28 points.28
KyotoLucerne
Score6638
Tourist attractions within 2 km6215
Park area within 2 km45 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoLucerne
Score5235
Notable places within 2 km7929
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 35 points.35
KyotoLucerne
Score7035
Price level global62.4110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Kyoto leads by 9 points.9
KyotoLucerne
Score6253
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm60 mm to 128 mm
Dry months00
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
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Lucerne
2
3
5
6
6
7
7
7
5
3
2
1

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). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoLucerne
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 49 km
TokyoHND, NRT
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
5 h 35 m
€288-317
KIX · 81 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
1 h 15 m
€163-196
ZRH · 49 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
6 h 25 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
8 h 5 m
€606-782
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
Hong KongHKG
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 49 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

MeasureKyotoLucerne
Official languageJapaneseFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyYen (JPY)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119112
Elevation51 m436 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoLucerne
City population1,463,72386,234
People per km²1,7682,963
Museums within 10 km7614
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre8946
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Kyoto or Lucerne 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.