VacationSelector

London or Shanghai?

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.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming 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.

LondonShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
LondonShanghai
Score017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km470
Coast distance43 km18 km
Water distance18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. London leads by 27 points.27
LondonShanghai
Score7245
Museums within 10 km148108
Museums within 2 km of centre4928
Share of museums within 2 km %3326
Unesco sites within 50 km40
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 2 points.2
LondonShanghai
Score4042
Protected land share 50 km %169
Landscape blanket share 50 km %140
Land share of disc %9782
Park area within 2 km84 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 6 points.6
LondonShanghai
Score7581
Tourist attractions within 2 km8586
Park area within 2 km84 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km310
Sights concentration. London leads by 38 points.38
LondonShanghai
Score8951
Notable places within 2 km64973
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 25 points.25
LondonShanghai
Score5479
Price level global84.949
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 2 points.2
LondonShanghai
Score6365
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 23.8 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 67 mm43 mm to 216 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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
London
No coastline within reach
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLondonShanghai
ChengduTFU, CTU
10 h 30 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 35 m
€216-247
PVG · 33 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
ChongqingCKG, CQW
10 h 45 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 25 m
€175-196
PVG · 33 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 15 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
GuangzhouCAN
11 h 50 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 5 m
€127-144
PVG · 33 km
ShenzhenSZX
11 h 55 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
2 h 5 m
€170-179
SHA · 14 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 35 m
€184-208
LHR · 23 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 10 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
13 h 45 m
no fares
LHR · 23 km
23 h 45 m
€1,545-1873
2 stops
PVG · 33 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

MeasureLondonShanghai
Official languageEnglishPutonghua
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112 or 999Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation4 m4 m
Main airportLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureLondonShanghai
City population8,799,72824,870,895
People per km²5,5983,922
Museums within 10 km21544
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km40
Distinct cuisines in the centre11664
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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