VacationSelector

Palermo or San Diego?

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

Your match

Palermo
55
match

Wins on value for money and sights concentration with your weighting.

San Diego
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips 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.

PalermoSan Diego
Beaches & swimming. Palermo leads by 4 points.4
PalermoSan Diego
Score6763
Swim season months51
Beaches 10 km1342
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. San Diego leads by 13 points.13
PalermoSan Diego
Score5063
Restaurants within 2 km of centre807823
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1327
Museums & heritage. Palermo leads by 6 points.6
PalermoSan Diego
Score5044
Museums within 10 km3259
Museums within 2 km of centre2630
Share of museums within 2 km %8151
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Palermo leads by 3 points.3
PalermoSan Diego
Score5350
Drinking venues within 4 km799615
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre515408
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6466
Nightclubs within 4 km1631
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 19 points.19
PalermoSan Diego
Score3655
Protected land share 50 km %46
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4552
Park area within 2 km63 hectares308 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 34 points.34
PalermoSan Diego
Score4175
Tourist attractions within 2 km1640
Park area within 2 km63 hectares308 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Palermo leads by 17 points.17
PalermoSan Diego
Score5740
Notable places within 2 km10440
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Palermo leads by 25 points.25
PalermoSan Diego
Score6843
Price level global64.9100
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 11 points.11
PalermoSan Diego
Score7788
Monthly daytime high12.6 °C to 27.8 °C18.6 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall4 mm to 71 mm0 mm to 56 mm
Dry months79
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
Palermo
13
13
14
16
20
24
28
28
25
21
17
14
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Sea temperature, °C
Palermo
15
14
15
16
19
22
26
27
25
23
20
17
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Palermo
48
45
35
35
18
9
4
11
37
67
71
69
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Daylight, hours per day
Palermo
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Palermo
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
8
7
5
4
San Diego
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Palermo: 1961-1990 normals, Ustica (66.8 km from centre). San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPalermoSan Diego
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 5 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
5 h 15 m
€299-455
1 stop
SAN · 3 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 50 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
MunichMUC
2 h 0 m
€175-215
1 stop
PMO · 25 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 40 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 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

MeasurePalermoSan Diego
Official languageItalian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation14 m129 m
Main airportFalcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO)25 km from centre103 non-stop destinationsSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasurePalermoSan Diego
City population630,1671,386,932
People per km²3,9241,438
Museums within 10 km4226
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre3344
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months1 month

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Palermo or San Diego 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.