VacationSelector

Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Tokyo
66
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat 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 JaneiroTokyo
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 79 points.79
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score10021
Swim season months124
Beaches 10 km611
Coast distance1 km5 km
Water distance1 km5 km
Places to eat. Tokyo leads by 36 points.36
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score5490
Restaurants within 2 km of centre8046,936
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1625
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 3 points.3
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score6966
Museums within 10 km110302
Museums within 2 km of centre5152
Share of museums within 2 km %4617
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Tokyo leads by 38 points.38
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score5795
Drinking venues within 4 km8186,895
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre5093,033
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6244
Nightclubs within 4 km5058
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score6258
Protected land share 50 km %21
Landscape blanket share 50 km %170
Land share of disc %5785
Park area within 2 km113 hectares85 hectares
Good for families. Tokyo leads by 12 points.12
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score5971
Tourist attractions within 2 km3040
Park area within 2 km113 hectares85 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km19
Sights concentration. Tokyo leads by 4 points.4
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score5660
Notable places within 2 km98121
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 11 points.11
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score8170
Price level global46.162.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 21 points.21
Rio de JaneiroTokyo
Score8564
Monthly daytime high24 °C to 28.4 °C10 °C to 31.5 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 232 mm57 mm to 237 mm
Dry months00
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
Tokyo
10
11
14
19
24
26
30
32
28
22
17
12
Sea temperature, °C
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Tokyo
14
13
13
15
18
21
23
26
25
22
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Tokyo
60
57
117
134
140
168
157
155
221
237
97
58
Daylight, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Tokyo
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record
Tokyo
6
6
6
6
6
4
5
6
4
4
5
6

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. Tokyo: 1991-2020 normals, Tokyo (3.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromRio de JaneiroTokyo
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
13 h 30 m
€813-1004
HND · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 40 m
€786-939
1 stop
HND · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
12 h 5 m
€835-923
HND · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
11 h 55 m
€820-907
1 stop
HND · 18 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
10 h 35 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
12 h 55 m
€966-988
1 stop
HND · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
12 h 50 m
no fares
HND · 18 km
HoustonIAH, HOU
10 h 10 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
13 h 15 m
no fares
NRT · 56 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
HND · 18 km
MadridMAD
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
NRT · 56 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
NRT · 56 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

MeasureRio de JaneiroTokyo
Official languagePortugueseJapanese
CurrencyBrazilian Real (BRL)Yen (JPY)
SocketsCN60 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-3UTC+9
Emergency numberPolice 190, ambulance 192, fire 193Police 110, fire 119
Elevation31 m6 m
Main airportRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinationsTokyo Haneda International Airport (HND)18 km from centre97 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureRio de JaneiroTokyo
City population6,211,22314,264,798
People per km²4,9306,501
Museums within 10 km70191
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre27125
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo 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. 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.