VacationSelector

Osaka or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Osaka
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on nature & day trips and sights concentration 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.

OsakaOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Osaka leads by 55 points.55
OsakaOttawa
Score550
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km259
Coast distance7 km423 km
Water distance7 km
Places to eat. Osaka leads by 26 points.26
OsakaOttawa
Score9064
Restaurants within 2 km of centre9,134684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2534
Museums & heritage. Osaka leads by 32 points.32
OsakaOttawa
Score6432
Museums within 10 km7815
Museums within 2 km of centre228
Share of museums within 2 km %2853
Unesco sites within 50 km61
Nightlife. Osaka leads by 53 points.53
OsakaOttawa
Score9744
Drinking venues within 4 km8,473432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre4,492303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5370
Nightclubs within 4 km9735
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 13 points.13
OsakaOttawa
Score2841
Protected land share 50 km %18
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %84100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Osaka leads by 26 points.26
OsakaOttawa
Score7246
Tourist attractions within 2 km4711
Park area within 2 km88 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km71
Sights concentration. Ottawa leads by 2 points.2
OsakaOttawa
Score4850
Notable places within 2 km6371
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Osaka leads by 16 points.16
OsakaOttawa
Score7054
Price level global62.484
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Osaka leads by 10 points.10
OsakaOttawa
Score6353
Monthly daytime high9.7 °C to 33.6 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 185 mm53 mm to 94 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
Osaka
10
11
14
20
25
28
32
34
30
24
18
12
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Osaka
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Osaka
47
61
103
103
136
185
175
113
146
140
73
56
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Osaka
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Osaka
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Osaka: 1991-2020 normals, Osaka (1.8 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromOsakaOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 10 m
no fares
KIX · 38 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 11 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 11 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 38 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
12 h 55 m
no fares
ITM · 11 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 38 km
4 h 50 m
€175-263
2 stops
YOW · 12 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

MeasureOsakaOttawa
Official languageJapaneseFrench, English
CurrencyYen (JPY)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the regionAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, fire 119911
Elevation20 m70 m
Main airportKansai International Airport (KIX)38 km from centre62 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureOsakaOttawa
City population2,751,8621,017,449
People per km²12,340366
Museums within 10 km4320
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre9762
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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