VacationSelector

Palermo or Sydney?

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 beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

PalermoSydney
Beaches & swimming. Palermo leads by 7 points.7
PalermoSydney
Score6760
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km13160
Coast distance1 km7 km
Water distance1 km7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 28 points.28
PalermoSydney
Score5078
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8072,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1331
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 1 points.1
PalermoSydney
Score5051
Museums within 10 km3244
Museums within 2 km of centre2620
Share of museums within 2 km %8145
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 22 points.22
PalermoSydney
Score5375
Drinking venues within 4 km7992,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre5151,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6469
Nightclubs within 4 km16120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 22 points.22
PalermoSydney
Score3658
Protected land share 50 km %410
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4552
Park area within 2 km63 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 23 points.23
PalermoSydney
Score4164
Tourist attractions within 2 km1637
Park area within 2 km63 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 3 points.3
PalermoSydney
Score5760
Notable places within 2 km104123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Palermo leads by 18 points.18
PalermoSydney
Score6850
Price level global64.990.2
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 4 points.4
PalermoSydney
Score7781
Monthly daytime high12.6 °C to 27.8 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall4 mm to 71 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months70
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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Palermo
15
14
15
16
19
22
26
27
25
23
20
17
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Palermo
48
45
35
35
18
9
4
11
37
67
71
69
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Palermo
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Palermo
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
8
7
5
4
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Palermo: 1961-1990 normals, Ustica (66.8 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPalermoSydney
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€40-52
PMO · 25 km
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 50 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 25 m
€101-135
PMO · 25 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 15 m
€183-194
PMO · 25 km
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 5 m
no fares
PMO · 25 km
19 h 30 m
no fares
SYD · 9 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 2026-08 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

MeasurePalermoSydney
Official languageItalianEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation14 m6 m
Main airportFalcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO)25 km from centre103 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasurePalermoSydney
City population630,1675,450,496
People per km²3,924449
Museums within 10 km4238
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre3379
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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