VacationSelector

Melbourne or Shanghai?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on value for money and good for families 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.

MelbourneShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 38 points.38
MelbourneShanghai
Score5517
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km190
Coast distance4 km18 km
Water distance4 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 4 points.4
MelbourneShanghai
Score4945
Museums within 10 km42108
Museums within 2 km of centre2428
Share of museums within 2 km %5726
Unesco sites within 50 km10
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 1 points.1
MelbourneShanghai
Score4342
Protected land share 50 km %69
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8182
Park area within 2 km166 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 21 points.21
MelbourneShanghai
Score6081
Tourist attractions within 2 km2686
Park area within 2 km166 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km110
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 6 points.6
MelbourneShanghai
Score5751
Notable places within 2 km10373
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 29 points.29
MelbourneShanghai
Score5079
Price level global90.249
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 11 points.11
MelbourneShanghai
Score7665
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm43 mm to 216 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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneShanghai
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
10 h 50 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 35 m
€216-247
PVG · 33 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
5 h 10 m
€274-364
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
5 h 50 m
€420-587
MEL · 19 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 10 m
€153-159
PVG · 33 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
5 h 10 m
€161-231
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 55 m
€606-798
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
DohaDOH
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
8 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 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

MeasureMelbourneShanghai
Official languageEnglishPutonghua
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number000Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation31 m4 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneShanghai
City population5,350,70524,870,895
People per km²5353,922
Museums within 10 km4244
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8664
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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