VacationSelector

London or Palermo?

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 nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Palermo
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money 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.

LondonPalermo
Beaches & swimming. Palermo leads by 67 points.67
LondonPalermo
Score067
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km4713
Coast distance43 km1 km
Water distance—1 km
Places to eat. London leads by 38 points.38
LondonPalermo
Score8850
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,317807
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4013
Museums & heritage. London leads by 22 points.22
LondonPalermo
Score7250
Museums within 10 km14832
Museums within 2 km of centre4926
Share of museums within 2 km %3381
Unesco sites within 50 km41
Nightlife. London leads by 42 points.42
LondonPalermo
Score9553
Drinking venues within 4 km5,327799
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,443515
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4664
Nightclubs within 4 km31216
Nature & day trips. London leads by 4 points.4
LondonPalermo
Score4036
Protected land share 50 km %164
Landscape blanket share 50 km %140
Land share of disc %9745
Park area within 2 km84 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 34 points.34
LondonPalermo
Score7541
Tourist attractions within 2 km8516
Park area within 2 km84 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. London leads by 32 points.32
LondonPalermo
Score8957
Notable places within 2 km649104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Palermo leads by 14 points.14
LondonPalermo
Score5468
Price level global84.964.9
Daily budget—€155
Year-round weather. Palermo leads by 14 points.14
LondonPalermo
Score6377
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 23.8 °C12.6 °C to 27.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 67 mm4 mm to 71 mm
Dry months17
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
Palermo
13
13
14
16
20
24
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
London
No coastline within reach
Palermo
15
14
15
16
19
22
26
27
25
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Palermo
48
45
35
35
18
9
4
11
37
67
71
69
Daylight, hours per day
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Palermo
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2
Palermo
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
8
7
5
4

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). Palermo: 1961-1990 normals, Ustica (66.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLondonPalermo
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 45 m
€83-138
LGW · 40 km
1 h 45 m
€31-110
PMO · 25 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 20 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
1 h 10 m
€40-52
PMO · 25 km
NaplesNAP
2 h 30 m
€170-347
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
1 h 0 m
€42-84
PMO · 25 km
VeronaVRN, VBS
1 h 55 m
€142-175
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
2 h 25 m
€101-135
PMO · 25 km
TurinTRN
1 h 45 m
no fares
STN · 49 km
1 h 45 m
€53-76
PMO · 25 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 0 m
€61-144
LGW · 40 km
1 h 50 m
€49-107
PMO · 25 km
BolognaBLQ
2 h 0 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
1 h 30 m
€28-65
PMO · 25 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
9 h 5 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
4 h 55 m
no fares
LTN · 44 km
3 h 10 m
€151-346
1 stop
PMO · 25 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

MeasureLondonPalermo
Official languageEnglishItalian
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation4 m14 m
Main airportLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinationsFalcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO)25 km from centre103 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureLondonPalermo
City population8,799,728630,167
People per km²5,5983,924
Museums within 10 km21542
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km41
Distinct cuisines in the centre11633
Swim season, months above 21 °C–5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow London or Palermo 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.