VacationSelector

Seattle or Seoul?

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

Your match

Seattle
52
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families 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.

SeattleSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 45 points.45
SeattleSeoul
Score6015
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km1001
Coast distance1 km28 km
Water distance1 km28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 10 points.10
SeattleSeoul
Score7585
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4603,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3532
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 47 points.47
SeattleSeoul
Score3683
Museums within 10 km28203
Museums within 2 km of centre1790
Share of museums within 2 km %6144
Unesco sites within 50 km05
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 23 points.23
SeattleSeoul
Score5780
Drinking venues within 4 km8733,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre6961,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8050
Nightclubs within 4 km3429
Nature & day trips. Seattle leads by 8 points.8
SeattleSeoul
Score4032
Protected land share 50 km %91
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8095
Park area within 2 km63 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 33 points.33
SeattleSeoul
Score4679
Tourist attractions within 2 km1762
Park area within 2 km63 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km18
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 7 points.7
SeattleSeoul
Score5259
Notable places within 2 km76118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seoul leads by 29 points.29
SeattleSeoul
Score4372
Price level global10059.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Seattle and Seoul are level on 61.
SeattleSeoul
Score6161
Monthly daytime high7.8 °C to 24.9 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall15 mm to 160 mm18 mm to 422 mm
Dry months34
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
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Seattle
No sunshine record
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre). Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSeattleSeoul
TokyoHND, NRT
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€140-229
ICN · 49 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
2 h 30 m
€111-203
SEA · 18 km
12 h 0 m
€637-697
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 15 m
€300-424
SEA · 18 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
San FranciscoSFO
1 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
11 h 20 m
€560-734
ICN · 49 km
Hong KongHKG
12 h 55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
3 h 5 m
€172-189
ICN · 49 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
5 h 0 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
13 h 50 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
€257-317
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 km
8 h 35 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
5 h 5 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
14 h 55 m
€1,052-1072
2 stops
ICN · 49 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

MeasureSeattleSeoul
Official languageKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Won (KRW)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC+9
Emergency number911Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation40 m38 m
Main airportSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureSeattleSeoul
City population737,0159,668,465
People per km²1,99615,973
Museums within 10 km2780
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km05
Distinct cuisines in the centre78156
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Seattle or Seoul 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.