VacationSelector

Melbourne or Seattle?

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.

Seattle
52
match

Wins on 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.

MelbourneSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneSeattle
Score5560
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km19100
Coast distance4 km1 km
Water distance4 km1 km
Places to eat. Melbourne and Seattle are level on 75.
MelbourneSeattle
Score7575
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,8881,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2935
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 13 points.13
MelbourneSeattle
Score4936
Museums within 10 km4228
Museums within 2 km of centre2417
Share of museums within 2 km %5761
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 17 points.17
MelbourneSeattle
Score7457
Drinking venues within 4 km1,921873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6280
Nightclubs within 4 km12434
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
MelbourneSeattle
Score4340
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8180
Park area within 2 km166 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 14 points.14
MelbourneSeattle
Score6046
Tourist attractions within 2 km2617
Park area within 2 km166 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneSeattle
Score5752
Notable places within 2 km10376
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
MelbourneSeattle
Score5043
Price level global90.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
MelbourneSeattle
Score7661
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm15 mm to 160 mm
Dry months03
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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Seattle
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). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneSeattle
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 30 m
€111-203
SEA · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
15 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
17 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
3 h 50 m
€204-286
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
San FranciscoSFO
15 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DohaDOH
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
ManilaMNL
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
13 h 15 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
SEA · 18 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

MeasureMelbourneSeattle
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 m40 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneSeattle
City population5,350,705737,015
People per km²5351,996
Museums within 10 km4227
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8678
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 Seattle 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.