VacationSelector

London or Los Angeles?

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

Your match

London
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on good for families and nightlife with your weighting.

Los Angeles
53
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

LondonLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Los Angeles leads by 29 points.29
LondonLos Angeles
Score029
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km470
Coast distance43 km
Water distance
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. London leads by 22 points.22
LondonLos Angeles
Score8866
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,3171,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4022
Museums & heritage. London leads by 23 points.23
LondonLos Angeles
Score7249
Museums within 10 km14869
Museums within 2 km of centre4923
Share of museums within 2 km %3333
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. London leads by 41 points.41
LondonLos Angeles
Score9554
Drinking venues within 4 km5,327660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,443432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4665
Nightclubs within 4 km31264
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 22 points.22
LondonLos Angeles
Score4062
Protected land share 50 km %1626
Landscape blanket share 50 km %140
Land share of disc %9780
Park area within 2 km84 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 42 points.42
LondonLos Angeles
Score7533
Tourist attractions within 2 km8511
Park area within 2 km84 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. London leads by 35 points.35
LondonLos Angeles
Score8954
Notable places within 2 km64988
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. London leads by 11 points.11
LondonLos Angeles
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 24 points.24
LondonLos Angeles
Score6387
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 23.8 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 67 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months18
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
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
London
No coastline within reach
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2
Los Angeles
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre). Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLondonLos Angeles
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
10 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Las VegasLAS
10 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
10 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Salt Lake CitySLC
9 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
11 h 0 m
€785-892
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
9 h 45 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
16 h 25 m
€964-1015
LAX · 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

MeasureLondonLos Angeles
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation4 m106 m
Main airportLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureLondonLos Angeles
City population8,799,7283,898,747
People per km²5,5982,994
Museums within 10 km21538
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre11646
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow London or Los Angeles 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. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.