VacationSelector

Kyoto or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and 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.

KyotoMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 38 points.38
KyotoMelbourne
Score1755
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km019
Coast distance47 km4 km
Water distance47 km4 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 9 points.9
KyotoMelbourne
Score8475
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,0231,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2229
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 23 points.23
KyotoMelbourne
Score7249
Museums within 10 km13242
Museums within 2 km of centre5124
Share of museums within 2 km %3957
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 6 points.6
KyotoMelbourne
Score8074
Drinking venues within 4 km3,2151,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,3631,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7362
Nightclubs within 4 km26124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 21 points.21
KyotoMelbourne
Score2243
Protected land share 50 km %26
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %10081
Park area within 2 km45 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 6 points.6
KyotoMelbourne
Score6660
Tourist attractions within 2 km6226
Park area within 2 km45 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
KyotoMelbourne
Score5257
Notable places within 2 km79103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 20 points.20
KyotoMelbourne
Score7050
Price level global62.490.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 14 points.14
KyotoMelbourne
Score6276
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm45 mm to 69 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

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). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoMelbourne
TokyoHND, NRT
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
6 h 25 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
5 h 35 m
€288-317
KIX · 81 km
9 h 15 m
€407-480
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
6 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
ManilaMNL
3 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 55 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 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

MeasureKyotoMelbourne
Official languageJapaneseEnglish
CurrencyYen (JPY)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+9UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119000
Elevation51 m31 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoMelbourne
City population1,463,7235,350,705
People per km²1,768535
Museums within 10 km7642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre8986
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 Melbourne 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.