VacationSelector

San Diego or Tampa?

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

Your match

San Diego
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Tampa
44
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

San DiegoTampa
Beaches & swimming. Tampa leads by 12 points.12
San DiegoTampa
Score6375
Swim season months18
Beaches 10 km4210
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. San Diego leads by 9 points.9
San DiegoTampa
Score6354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre823359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2731
Museums & heritage. San Diego leads by 17 points.17
San DiegoTampa
Score4427
Museums within 10 km5913
Museums within 2 km of centre3010
Share of museums within 2 km %5177
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. San Diego leads by 11 points.11
San DiegoTampa
Score5039
Drinking venues within 4 km615324
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre408227
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6670
Nightclubs within 4 km3126
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 25 points.25
San DiegoTampa
Score5530
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5272
Park area within 2 km308 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 45 points.45
San DiegoTampa
Score7530
Tourist attractions within 2 km403
Park area within 2 km308 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km35
Sights concentration. San Diego leads by 19 points.19
San DiegoTampa
Score4021
Notable places within 2 km4013
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. San Diego and Tampa are level on 43.
San DiegoTampa
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 13 points.13
San DiegoTampa
Score8875
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 25 °C21.5 °C to 32.6 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 56 mm36 mm to 228 mm
Dry months91
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
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Tampa
22
23
25
28
31
32
32
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Tampa
18
18
20
23
26
28
30
30
29
27
23
20
Rainfall, mm
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Tampa
66
66
64
64
67
187
197
228
156
60
36
65
Daylight, hours per day
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Tampa
11
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
San Diego
No sunshine record
Tampa
7
7
9
10
11
10
9
10
8
8
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre). Tampa: 1991-2020 normals, Tampa International Airport (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan DiegoTampa
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 15 m
€299-455
1 stop
SAN · 3 km
2 h 35 m
€178-237
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 35 m
€176-204
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 15 m
€64-224
SAN · 3 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
BostonBOS, PSM
5 h 35 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 25 m
€163-176
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
1 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
4 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
RaleighRDU
4 h 50 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
TokyoHND, NRT
11 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
MunichMUC
12 h 5 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
MCO · 125 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

MeasureSan DiegoTampa
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation129 m30 m
Main airportSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinationsTampa International Airport (TPA)8 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan DiegoTampa
City population1,386,932384,959
People per km²1,438848
Museums within 10 km266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre4447
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month8 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow San Diego or Tampa 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). 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.