VacationSelector

Riga or Sydney?

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

Your match

Riga
53
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on good for families and year-round weather 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.

RigaSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 20 points.20
RigaSydney
Score4060
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km57160
Coast distance12 km7 km
Water distance12 km7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 19 points.19
RigaSydney
Score5978
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4702,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3331
Museums & heritage. Riga leads by 10 points.10
RigaSydney
Score6151
Museums within 10 km6944
Museums within 2 km of centre4720
Share of museums within 2 km %6845
Unesco sites within 50 km12
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 24 points.24
RigaSydney
Score5175
Drinking venues within 4 km5842,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre4561,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7869
Nightclubs within 4 km54120
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 14 points.14
RigaSydney
Score4458
Protected land share 50 km %1010
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7352
Park area within 2 km68 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 29 points.29
RigaSydney
Score3564
Tourist attractions within 2 km737
Park area within 2 km68 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Riga leads by 2 points.2
RigaSydney
Score6260
Notable places within 2 km137123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Riga leads by 26 points.26
RigaSydney
Score7650
Price level global53.790.2
Daily budget€132
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 29 points.29
RigaSydney
Score5281
Monthly daytime high-0.1 °C to 23.5 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall33 mm to 87 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months30
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
Riga
0
0
4
12
17
21
24
22
17
11
5
1
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Riga
2
1
1
3
9
14
18
19
16
11
8
5
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Riga
43
40
35
33
52
69
87
78
65
82
58
50
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Riga
8
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Riga
No sunshine record
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. Riga: 1991-2020 normals, Riga (4.1 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRigaSydney
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 40 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 50 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 45 m
no fares
RIX · 9 km
14 h 50 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

MeasureRigaSydney
Official languageLatvianEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation6 m6 m
Main airportRiga International Airport (RIX)9 km from centre101 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days

By the numbers

MeasureRigaSydney
City population588,9115,450,496
People per km²449
Museums within 10 km1238
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km12
Distinct cuisines in the centre5579
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone6 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Riga 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. 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.