VacationSelector

Kyoto or Sydney?

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 museums & heritage and value for money with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
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.

KyotoSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 43 points.43
KyotoSydney
Score1760
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km0160
Coast distance47 km7 km
Water distance47 km7 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 6 points.6
KyotoSydney
Score8478
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5,0232,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2231
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 21 points.21
KyotoSydney
Score7251
Museums within 10 km13244
Museums within 2 km of centre5120
Share of museums within 2 km %3945
Unesco sites within 50 km42
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 5 points.5
KyotoSydney
Score8075
Drinking venues within 4 km3,2152,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,3631,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7369
Nightclubs within 4 km26120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 36 points.36
KyotoSydney
Score2258
Protected land share 50 km %210
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %10052
Park area within 2 km45 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 2 points.2
KyotoSydney
Score6664
Tourist attractions within 2 km6237
Park area within 2 km45 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 8 points.8
KyotoSydney
Score5260
Notable places within 2 km79123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kyoto leads by 20 points.20
KyotoSydney
Score7050
Price level global62.490.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 19 points.19
KyotoSydney
Score6281
Monthly daytime high8.6 °C to 32.4 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 232 mm55 mm to 121 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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

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). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromKyotoSydney
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 40 m
€107-142
KIX · 81 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
TokyoHND, NRT
1 h 10 m
€118-135
ITM · 39 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
2 h 10 m
€237-303
KIX · 81 km
9 h 55 m
€539-575
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
6 h 25 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
SapporoCTS, OKD
1 h 55 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
3 h 35 m
€254-314
KIX · 81 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
ManilaMNL
3 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 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

MeasureKyotoSydney
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 m6 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureKyotoSydney
City population1,463,7235,450,496
People per km²1,768449
Museums within 10 km7638
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km42
Distinct cuisines in the centre8979
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Kyoto or Sydney 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.