VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or Thessaloniki?

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

Your match

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Thessaloniki
59
match

Wins on nightlife 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.

Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 45 points.45
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score10055
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km614
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score5450
Restaurants within 2 km of centre804640
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1615
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 20 points.20
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score6949
Museums within 10 km11034
Museums within 2 km of centre5122
Share of museums within 2 km %4665
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Thessaloniki leads by 10 points.10
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score5767
Drinking venues within 4 km8181,407
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre509805
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6257
Nightclubs within 4 km5061
Nature & day trips. Thessaloniki leads by 3 points.3
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score6265
Protected land share 50 km %2125
Landscape blanket share 50 km %170
Land share of disc %5783
Park area within 2 km113 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 18 points.18
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score5941
Tourist attractions within 2 km3016
Park area within 2 km113 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro and Thessaloniki are level on 56.
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score5656
Notable places within 2 km9898
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 7 points.7
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score8174
Price level global46.155.8
Daily budget€125
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 13 points.13
Rio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Score8572
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C9.7 °C to 32.1 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm21 mm to 56 mm
Dry months09
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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Thessaloniki
10
11
15
19
25
30
32
32
27
21
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Thessaloniki
14
13
13
15
19
23
26
27
25
21
18
15
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Thessaloniki
35
32
38
36
44
30
23
21
33
41
38
56
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Thessaloniki
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record
Thessaloniki
4
4
6
6
9
11
11
10
8
6
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km. Thessaloniki: 1991-2020 normals, Thessaloniki Airport (14 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroThessaloniki
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
3 h 15 m
€95-156
SKG · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 30 m
€119-127
SKG · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
2 h 55 m
€225-285
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
1 h 45 m
€117-203
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
2 h 50 m
€98-154
1 stop
SKG · 14 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

MeasureRio de JaneiroThessaloniki
Official languagePortugueseGreek
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCN60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193112
Elevation31 m6 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsThessaloniki Macedonia International Airport (SKG)14 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroThessaloniki
City population6,211,223309,617
People per km²4,93016,042
Museums within 10 km7031
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre2745
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Rio de Janeiro or Thessaloniki 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). Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.