VacationSelector

San Francisco or York?

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

Your match

San Francisco
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

York
41
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage 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 FranciscoYork
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 60 points.60
San FranciscoYork
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km442
Coast distance2 km50 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 29 points.29
San FranciscoYork
Score8354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,359361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3931
Museums & heritage. York leads by 2 points.2
San FranciscoYork
Score4446
Museums within 10 km5718
Museums within 2 km of centre2916
Share of museums within 2 km %5189
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. San Francisco leads by 25 points.25
San FranciscoYork
Score6843
Drinking venues within 4 km1,434450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre928353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6578
Nightclubs within 4 km9714
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 27 points.27
San FranciscoYork
Score6033
Protected land share 50 km %1717
Landscape blanket share 50 km %416
Land share of disc %5795
Park area within 2 km45 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. San Francisco leads by 14 points.14
San FranciscoYork
Score5743
Tourist attractions within 2 km4813
Park area within 2 km45 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 24 points.24
San FranciscoYork
Score6339
Notable places within 2 km14737
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. York leads by 11 points.11
San FranciscoYork
Score4354
Price level global10084.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 22 points.22
San FranciscoYork
Score7856
Monthly daytime high14 °C to 23.2 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 105 mm39 mm to 66 mm
Dry months71
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 Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
San Francisco
No sunshine record
York
2
3
4
5
6
5
6
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. San Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan FranciscoYork
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 55 m
€653-1326
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
11 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
4 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 104 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 2026-09, 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 FranciscoYork
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation16 m25 m
Main airportSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan FranciscoYork
City population873,965208,400
People per km²1,455766
Museums within 10 km5024
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre10854
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow San Francisco or York 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.