VacationSelector

Manila or Santiago?

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

Your match

Manila
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Santiago
55
match

Wins on year-round weather and nature & day trips 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.

ManilaSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Manila leads by 76 points.76
ManilaSantiago
Score760
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km30
Coast distance2 km89 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 14 points.14
ManilaSantiago
Score5872
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0151,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1732
Museums & heritage. Manila leads by 5 points.5
ManilaSantiago
Score5045
Museums within 10 km7787
Museums within 2 km of centre2330
Share of museums within 2 km %3034
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Manila and Santiago are level on 61.
ManilaSantiago
Score6161
Drinking venues within 4 km1,082912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre374542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3559
Nightclubs within 4 km36112
Nature & day trips. Santiago leads by 23 points.23
ManilaSantiago
Score2952
Protected land share 50 km %417
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %78100
Park area within 2 km54 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Manila leads by 11 points.11
ManilaSantiago
Score6049
Tourist attractions within 2 km3712
Park area within 2 km54 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Manila leads by 4 points.4
ManilaSantiago
Score5248
Notable places within 2 km7962
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Manila leads by 9 points.9
ManilaSantiago
Score9081
Price level global33.746.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 24 points.24
ManilaSantiago
Score6185
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 34.6 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall24 mm to 564 mm0 mm to 87 mm
Dry months48
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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Manila
11
12
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Manila
No sunshine record
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromManilaSantiago
SydneySYD, WSI
8 h 0 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
14 h 0 m
€1,325-1342
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
13 h 20 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MelbourneAVV, MEL, MEB
8 h 5 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 55 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 25 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
16 h 5 m
€960-1123
SCL · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
16 h 15 m
no fares
MNL · 11 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SCL · 14 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureManilaSantiago
Official languageEnglish, Filipino, TaglishSpanish
CurrencyPhilippine Peso (PHP)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsABC220 V, 60 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number911Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation9 m575 m
Main airportNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureManilaSantiago
City population1,902,5906,257,516
People per km²76,1047,468
Museums within 10 km2754
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre3964
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

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