VacationSelector

Manila or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Manila
60
match

Wins on value for money and places to eat with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

ManilaRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 24 points.24
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score76100
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km361
Coast distance2 km1 km
Water distance2 km1 km
Places to eat. Manila leads by 4 points.4
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score5854
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,015804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1716
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 19 points.19
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score5069
Museums within 10 km77110
Museums within 2 km of centre2351
Share of museums within 2 km %3046
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Manila leads by 4 points.4
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score6157
Drinking venues within 4 km1,082818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre374509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3562
Nightclubs within 4 km3650
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 33 points.33
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score2962
Protected land share 50 km %421
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %7857
Park area within 2 km54 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Manila leads by 1 points.1
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score6059
Tourist attractions within 2 km3730
Park area within 2 km54 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score5256
Notable places within 2 km7998
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Manila leads by 9 points.9
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score9081
Price level global33.746.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 24 points.24
ManilaRio de Janeiro
Score6185
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 34.6 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall24 mm to 564 mm42 mm to 232 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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Manila
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromManilaRio de Janeiro
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
16 h 45 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 45 m
€428-448
MNL · 11 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
16 h 15 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 20 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 55 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 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

MeasureManilaRio de Janeiro
Official languageEnglish, Filipino, TaglishPortuguese
CurrencyPhilippine Peso (PHP)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC-3
Emergency number911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation9 m31 m
Main airportNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureManilaRio de Janeiro
City population1,902,5906,211,223
People per km²76,1044,930
Museums within 10 km2770
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre3927
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Manila or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.