VacationSelector

Manila or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Manila
60
match

Wins on value for money and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

ManilaMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Manila leads by 21 points.21
ManilaMelbourne
Score7655
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km319
Coast distance2 km4 km
Water distance2 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 17 points.17
ManilaMelbourne
Score5875
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0151,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1729
Museums & heritage. Manila leads by 1 points.1
ManilaMelbourne
Score5049
Museums within 10 km7742
Museums within 2 km of centre2324
Share of museums within 2 km %3057
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 13 points.13
ManilaMelbourne
Score6174
Drinking venues within 4 km1,0821,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3741,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3562
Nightclubs within 4 km36124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 14 points.14
ManilaMelbourne
Score2943
Protected land share 50 km %46
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7881
Park area within 2 km54 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Manila and Melbourne are level on 60.
ManilaMelbourne
Score6060
Tourist attractions within 2 km3726
Park area within 2 km54 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
ManilaMelbourne
Score5257
Notable places within 2 km79103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Manila leads by 40 points.40
ManilaMelbourne
Score9050
Price level global33.790.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
ManilaMelbourne
Score6176
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 34.6 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall24 mm to 564 mm45 mm to 69 mm
Dry months40
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
Manila
31
31
33
35
34
33
32
31
31
32
31
31
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Manila
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Manila
No sunshine record
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. Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromManilaMelbourne
TokyoHND, NRT
4 h 10 m
€304-317
MNL · 11 km
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
3 h 30 m
€154-174
MNL · 11 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
3 h 50 m
€345-396
MNL · 11 km
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 0 m
€128-135
MNL · 11 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
3 h 35 m
€159-184
1 stop
MNL · 11 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SydneySYD, WSI
8 h 0 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
2 h 35 m
€142-175
MNL · 11 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
9 h 15 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
14 h 30 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 25 m
no fares
MNL · 11 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 2026-09 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

MeasureManilaMelbourne
Official languageEnglish, Filipino, TaglishEnglish
CurrencyPhilippine Peso (PHP)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number911000
Elevation9 m31 m
Main airportNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureManilaMelbourne
City population1,902,5905,350,705
People per km²76,104535
Museums within 10 km2742
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre3986
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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