VacationSelector

Paphos or Shanghai?

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

Your match

Paphos
46
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Shanghai
✓ Best match
54
match

Wins on good for families 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.

PaphosShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Paphos leads by 62 points.62
PaphosShanghai
Score7917
Swim season months65
Beaches 10 km270
Coast distance1 km18 km
Water distance1 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 23 points.23
PaphosShanghai
Score2245
Museums within 10 km8108
Museums within 2 km of centre328
Share of museums within 2 km %3826
Unesco sites within 50 km20
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 19 points.19
PaphosShanghai
Score2342
Protected land share 50 km %29
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %3382
Park area within 2 km27 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 39 points.39
PaphosShanghai
Score4281
Tourist attractions within 2 km3086
Park area within 2 km27 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km010
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 32 points.32
PaphosShanghai
Score1951
Notable places within 2 km1273
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 9 points.9
PaphosShanghai
Score7079
Price level global61.449
Daily budget€129
Year-round weather. Paphos leads by 21 points.21
PaphosShanghai
Score8665
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 30.8 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 98 mm43 mm to 216 mm
Dry months80
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
Paphos
17
17
19
21
25
28
30
31
29
27
23
19
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Paphos
No sunshine record
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. Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromPaphosShanghai
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
ManchesterMAN
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AthensATH
1 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
10 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ViennaVIE
3 h 0 m
€206-323
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
10 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BudapestBUD
2 h 45 m
€143-223
PFO · 8 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
4 h 5 m
€176-392
2 stops
PFO · 8 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
3 h 25 m
no fares
LCA · 110 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
AlmatyALA
5 h 10 m
€377-465
2 stops
LCA · 110 km
5 h 30 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

MeasurePaphosShanghai
Official languageTurkish, Greek, Modern GreekPutonghua
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsG240 V, 50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation72 m4 m
Main airportPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasurePaphosShanghai
City population35,96124,870,895
People per km²1,9873,922
Museums within 10 km444
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre3664
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Paphos 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). 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.