VacationSelector

Melbourne or San Jose?

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 beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

MelbourneSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 47 points.47
MelbourneSan Jose
Score558
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km191
Coast distance4 km14 km
Water distance4 km14 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 34 points.34
MelbourneSan Jose
Score7541
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,888313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2916
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 23 points.23
MelbourneSan Jose
Score4926
Museums within 10 km4220
Museums within 2 km of centre249
Share of museums within 2 km %5745
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 43 points.43
MelbourneSan Jose
Score7431
Drinking venues within 4 km1,921231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,20088
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6238
Nightclubs within 4 km12416
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 27 points.27
MelbourneSan Jose
Score4370
Protected land share 50 km %626
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %8191
Park area within 2 km166 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 27 points.27
MelbourneSan Jose
Score6033
Tourist attractions within 2 km262
Park area within 2 km166 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 43 points.43
MelbourneSan Jose
Score5714
Notable places within 2 km1039
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
MelbourneSan Jose
Score5043
Price level global90.2100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 9 points.9
MelbourneSan Jose
Score7685
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months08
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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
San Jose
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). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneSan Jose
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
SJC · 8 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
17 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
16 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
BrisbaneBNE
2 h 15 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
14 h 5 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
AdelaideADL
1 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
15 h 55 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
SydneySYD, WSI
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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

MeasureMelbourneSan Jose
Official languageEnglish–
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number000911
Elevation31 m25 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneSan Jose
City population5,350,7051,013,240
People per km²5352,167
Museums within 10 km4219
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8630
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 San Jose 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.