VacationSelector

Kyoto or Lyon?

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 beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Lyon
52
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

KyotoLyon
Beaches & swimming. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoLyon
Score170
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km026
Coast distance47 km253 km
Water distance47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 5 points.5
KyotoLyon
Score8479
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,0231,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2240
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoLyon
Score7255
Museums within 10 km13253
Museums within 2 km of centre5125
Share of museums within 2 km %3947
Unesco sites within 50 km42
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 22 points.22
KyotoLyon
Score8058
Drinking venues within 4 km3,215866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,363611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7371
Nightclubs within 4 km2647
Nature & day trips. Lyon leads by 11 points.11
KyotoLyon
Score2233
Protected land share 50 km %26
Landscape blanket share 50 km %26
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km45 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 7 points.7
KyotoLyon
Score6659
Tourist attractions within 2 km6225
Park area within 2 km45 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 2 points.2
KyotoLyon
Score5254
Notable places within 2 km7986
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 8 points.8
KyotoLyon
Score7062
Price level global62.473.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 2 points.2
KyotoLyon
Score6264
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm43 mm to 101 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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

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). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoLyon
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 55 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
12 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
2 h 45 m
€327-334
KIX · 81 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 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 2026-09 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

MeasureKyotoLyon
Official languageJapaneseFrench
CurrencyYen (JPY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119112
Elevation51 m160 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoLyon
City population1,463,723519,127
People per km²1,76810,838
Museums within 10 km7642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km42
Distinct cuisines in the centre89148
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 Lyon 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.