VacationSelector

Melbourne or Reykjavik?

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

Your match

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on nightlife and year-round weather with your weighting.

Reykjavik
46
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.

MelbourneReykjavik
Beaches & swimming. Reykjavik leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneReykjavik
Score5560
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1933
Coast distance4 km0 km
Water distance4 km0 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 26 points.26
MelbourneReykjavik
Score7549
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,888261
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2929
Museums & heritage. Reykjavik leads by 1 points.1
MelbourneReykjavik
Score4950
Museums within 10 km4234
Museums within 2 km of centre2423
Share of museums within 2 km %5768
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 47 points.47
MelbourneReykjavik
Score7427
Drinking venues within 4 km1,921192
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200166
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6286
Nightclubs within 4 km12410
Nature & day trips. Reykjavik leads by 16 points.16
MelbourneReykjavik
Score4359
Protected land share 50 km %616
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8156
Park area within 2 km166 hectares28 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 18 points.18
MelbourneReykjavik
Score6042
Tourist attractions within 2 km2621
Park area within 2 km166 hectares28 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 9 points.9
MelbourneReykjavik
Score5748
Notable places within 2 km10361
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Melbourne leads by 9 points.9
MelbourneReykjavik
Score5041
Price level global90.2102.8
Daily budget—€243
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 39 points.39
MelbourneReykjavik
Score7637
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C3.2 °C to 14.9 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm41 mm to 97 mm
Dry months00
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
Reykjavik
3
3
4
7
10
13
15
14
11
8
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Reykjavik
5
5
5
6
7
10
11
11
10
8
7
6
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Reykjavik
86
87
84
56
49
41
50
66
87
80
86
97
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Reykjavik
6
9
12
15
18
21
20
16
13
10
7
4
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Reykjavik
1
2
4
5
7
6
6
5
4
3
1
0

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). Reykjavik: 1991-2020 normals, Reykjavik (2.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneReykjavik
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
5 h 30 m
no fares
KEF · 37 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
KEF · 37 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.

Before you go

MeasureMelbourneReykjavik
Official languageEnglishIcelandic
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Iceland Krona (ISK)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC
Emergency number000112
Elevation31 m8 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsKeflavik International Airport (KEF)37 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneReykjavik
City population5,350,705138,772
People per km²535569
Museums within 10 km4223
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre8642
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

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