VacationSelector

Melbourne or Paris?

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

Your match

Melbourne
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Paris
✓ Best match
67
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

MelbourneParis
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
MelbourneParis
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km192
Coast distance4 km149 km
Water distance4 km
Places to eat. Paris leads by 15 points.15
MelbourneParis
Score7590
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,8884,732
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2933
Museums & heritage. Paris leads by 27 points.27
MelbourneParis
Score4976
Museums within 10 km42185
Museums within 2 km of centre2465
Share of museums within 2 km %5735
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Paris leads by 14 points.14
MelbourneParis
Score7488
Drinking venues within 4 km1,9213,796
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,2001,694
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6245
Nightclubs within 4 km124201
Nature & day trips. Paris leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneParis
Score4348
Protected land share 50 km %628
Landscape blanket share 50 km %026
Land share of disc %81100
Park area within 2 km166 hectares82 hectares
Good for families. Paris leads by 15 points.15
MelbourneParis
Score6075
Tourist attractions within 2 km2689
Park area within 2 km166 hectares82 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Paris leads by 37 points.37
MelbourneParis
Score5794
Notable places within 2 km103865
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Paris leads by 12 points.12
MelbourneParis
Score5062
Price level global90.273.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
MelbourneParis
Score7666
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C7.8 °C to 26 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm38 mm to 75 mm
Dry months01
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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Paris
8
9
13
17
20
24
26
26
22
17
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Paris
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Paris
45
38
41
45
75
51
58
54
51
55
54
62
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Paris
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Paris
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre). Paris: 1991-2020 normals, Paris-Montsouris (4.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneParis
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
11 h 25 m
€687-789
CDG · 22 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
13 h 15 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
6 h 50 m
€292-389
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
3 h 15 m
€152-378
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
DohaDOH
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
6 h 30 m
€425-436
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
SydneySYD, WSI
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
12 h 5 m
€705-999
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
Ho Chi Minh CitySGN
8 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 35 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
SantiagoSCL
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
CDG · 22 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

MeasureMelbourneParis
Official languageEnglishFrench
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number000112
Elevation31 m27 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsCharles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG)22 km from centre277 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneParis
City population5,350,7052,103,778
People per km²53519,960
Museums within 10 km42251
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre86169
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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