VacationSelector

Kyoto or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Kyoto
58
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
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.

KyotoRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 83 points.83
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score17100
Swim season months512
Beaches 10 km061
Coast distance47 km1 km
Water distance47 km1 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 30 points.30
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score8454
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,023804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2216
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 3 points.3
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score7269
Museums within 10 km132110
Museums within 2 km of centre5151
Share of museums within 2 km %3946
Unesco sites within 50 km43
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 23 points.23
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score8057
Drinking venues within 4 km3,215818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,363509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7362
Nightclubs within 4 km2650
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 40 points.40
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score2262
Protected land share 50 km %221
Landscape blanket share 50 km %217
Land share of disc %10057
Park area within 2 km45 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 7 points.7
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score6659
Tourist attractions within 2 km6230
Park area within 2 km45 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score5256
Notable places within 2 km7998
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 11 points.11
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score7081
Price level global62.446.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 23 points.23
KyotoRio de Janeiro
Score6285
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm42 mm to 232 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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Rio de Janeiro
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). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoRio de Janeiro
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 10 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 35 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
12 h 5 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 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

MeasureKyotoRio de Janeiro
Official languageJapanesePortuguese
CurrencyYen (JPY)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionCN60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC-3
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation51 m31 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoRio de Janeiro
City population1,463,7236,211,223
People per km²1,7684,930
Museums within 10 km7670
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km43
Distinct cuisines in the centre8927
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Kyoto or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.