VacationSelector

London or Melbourne?

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 sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
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.

LondonMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
LondonMelbourne
Score055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km4719
Coast distance43 km4 km
Water distance—4 km
Places to eat. London leads by 13 points.13
LondonMelbourne
Score8875
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,3171,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4029
Museums & heritage. London leads by 23 points.23
LondonMelbourne
Score7249
Museums within 10 km14842
Museums within 2 km of centre4924
Share of museums within 2 km %3357
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. London leads by 21 points.21
LondonMelbourne
Score9574
Drinking venues within 4 km5,3271,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,4431,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4662
Nightclubs within 4 km312124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
LondonMelbourne
Score4043
Protected land share 50 km %166
Landscape blanket share 50 km %140
Land share of disc %9781
Park area within 2 km84 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 15 points.15
LondonMelbourne
Score7560
Tourist attractions within 2 km8526
Park area within 2 km84 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. London leads by 32 points.32
LondonMelbourne
Score8957
Notable places within 2 km649103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. London leads by 4 points.4
LondonMelbourne
Score5450
Price level global84.990.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 13 points.13
LondonMelbourne
Score6376
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 23.8 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 67 mm45 mm to 69 mm
Dry months10
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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
London
No coastline within reach
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2
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. London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLondonMelbourne
SingaporeSIN, XSP
13 h 30 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SydneySYD, WSI
20 h 40 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 30 m
€665-831
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
11 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
12 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
12 h 40 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
13 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
6 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SantiagoSCL
14 h 25 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 35 m
no fares
LHR · 23 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

MeasureLondonMelbourne
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999000
Elevation4 m31 m
Main airportLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureLondonMelbourne
City population8,799,7285,350,705
People per km²5,598535
Museums within 10 km21542
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre11686
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow London 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. 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.