VacationSelector

Kyoto or Portland?

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 museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Portland
42
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.

KyotoPortland
Beaches & swimming. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoPortland
Score170
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km027
Coast distance47 km69 km
Water distance47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 10 points.10
KyotoPortland
Score8474
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,0231,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2244
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 37 points.37
KyotoPortland
Score7235
Museums within 10 km13223
Museums within 2 km of centre5115
Share of museums within 2 km %3965
Unesco sites within 50 km40
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 22 points.22
KyotoPortland
Score8058
Drinking venues within 4 km3,215942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,363518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7355
Nightclubs within 4 km2632
Nature & day trips. Portland leads by 13 points.13
KyotoPortland
Score2235
Protected land share 50 km %213
Landscape blanket share 50 km %23
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km45 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 32 points.32
KyotoPortland
Score6634
Tourist attractions within 2 km628
Park area within 2 km45 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 17 points.17
KyotoPortland
Score5235
Notable places within 2 km7929
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 27 points.27
KyotoPortland
Score7043
Price level global62.4100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 3 points.3
KyotoPortland
Score6265
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months03
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Portland
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
Portland
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). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoPortland
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
10 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
12 h 55 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
10 h 10 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
HonoluluHNL
8 h 25 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
5 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
12 h 20 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureKyotoPortland
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 m152 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoPortland
City population1,463,723652,503
People per km²1,7681,736
Museums within 10 km7617
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km40
Distinct cuisines in the centre8982
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 Portland 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.