VacationSelector

San Diego or West Palm Beach?

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 nightlife with your weighting.

West Palm Beach
42
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Beaches & swimming. West Palm Beach leads by 25 points.25
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score6388
Swim season months112
Beaches 10 km4210
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. San Diego leads by 26 points.26
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score6337
Restaurants within 2 km of centre823262
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2714
Museums & heritage. San Diego leads by 27 points.27
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score4417
Museums within 10 km595
Museums within 2 km of centre303
Share of museums within 2 km %5160
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. San Diego leads by 30 points.30
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score5020
Drinking venues within 4 km615132
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre40890
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6668
Nightclubs within 4 km3110
Nature & day trips. West Palm Beach leads by 14 points.14
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score5569
Protected land share 50 km %615
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5245
Park area within 2 km308 hectares34 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 54 points.54
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score7521
Tourist attractions within 2 km403
Park area within 2 km308 hectares34 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. San Diego leads by 28 points.28
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score4012
Notable places within 2 km408
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. San Diego and West Palm Beach are level on 43.
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 13 points.13
San DiegoWest Palm Beach
Score8875
Monthly daytime high18.6 °C to 25 °C24 °C to 32.5 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 56 mm67 mm to 217 mm
Dry months90
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
West Palm Beach
24
25
26
28
30
32
32
33
31
30
27
25
Sea temperature, °C
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
West Palm Beach
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Rainfall, mm
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
West Palm Beach
86
67
84
92
126
214
145
217
199
147
88
78
Daylight, hours per day
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
West Palm Beach
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11

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). West Palm Beach: 1991-2020 normals, Palm Beach International (5.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan DiegoWest Palm Beach
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 15 m
€299-455
1 stop
SAN · 3 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
San FranciscoSFO
1 h 30 m
€121-158
SAN · 3 km
5 h 35 m
€349-373
2 stops
FLL · 72 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
4 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
BostonBOS, PSM
5 h 35 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 15 m
€64-224
SAN · 3 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
Las VegasLAS
1 h 10 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
FLL · 72 km
PhiladelphiaPHL, TTN
5 h 10 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MunichMUC
12 h 5 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MIA · 105 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 DiegoWest Palm Beach
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 m6 m
Main airportSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinationsPresident Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT)6 km from centre37 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan DiegoWest Palm Beach
City population1,386,932117,415
People per km²1,438786
Museums within 10 km264
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre4418
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 month12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow San Diego or West Palm Beach 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.