VacationSelector

Seoul or Thessaloniki?

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

Your match

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on good for families and places to eat with your weighting.

Thessaloniki
59
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.

SeoulThessaloniki
Beaches & swimming. Thessaloniki leads by 40 points.40
SeoulThessaloniki
Score1555
Swim season months25
Beaches 10 km14
Coast distance28 km0 km
Water distance28 km0 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 35 points.35
SeoulThessaloniki
Score8550
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,559640
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3215
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 34 points.34
SeoulThessaloniki
Score8349
Museums within 10 km20334
Museums within 2 km of centre9022
Share of museums within 2 km %4465
Unesco sites within 50 km51
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 13 points.13
SeoulThessaloniki
Score8067
Drinking venues within 4 km3,2911,407
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,630805
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5057
Nightclubs within 4 km2961
Nature & day trips. Thessaloniki leads by 33 points.33
SeoulThessaloniki
Score3265
Protected land share 50 km %125
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %9583
Park area within 2 km126 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 38 points.38
SeoulThessaloniki
Score7941
Tourist attractions within 2 km6216
Park area within 2 km126 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km81
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 3 points.3
SeoulThessaloniki
Score5956
Notable places within 2 km11898
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Thessaloniki leads by 2 points.2
SeoulThessaloniki
Score7274
Price level global59.455.8
Daily budget€125
Year-round weather. Thessaloniki leads by 11 points.11
SeoulThessaloniki
Score6172
Monthly daytime high2 °C to 30 °C9.7 °C to 32.1 °C
Monthly rainfall18 mm to 422 mm21 mm to 56 mm
Dry months49
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
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Thessaloniki
10
11
15
19
25
30
32
32
27
21
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Thessaloniki
14
13
13
15
19
23
26
27
25
21
18
15
Rainfall, mm
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Thessaloniki
35
32
38
36
44
30
23
21
33
41
38
56
Daylight, hours per day
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Thessaloniki
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5
Thessaloniki
4
4
6
6
9
11
11
10
8
6
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre). Thessaloniki: 1991-2020 normals, Thessaloniki Airport (14 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSeoulThessaloniki
AthensATH
10 h 40 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
1 h 0 m
€97-118
SKG · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
3 h 15 m
€95-156
SKG · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€646-685
ICN · 49 km
2 h 30 m
€119-127
SKG · 14 km
MunichMUC
10 h 40 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
2 h 10 m
€188-242
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 0 m
€493-591
ICN · 49 km
1 h 15 m
€151-156
SKG · 14 km
ViennaVIE
10 h 20 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
1 h 50 m
€125-175
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 15 m
€632-735
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
1 h 45 m
€117-203
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
2 h 50 m
€98-154
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 45 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
2 h 55 m
€225-285
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
SKG · 14 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

MeasureSeoulThessaloniki
Official languageKorean, Korean Sign LanguageGreek
CurrencyWon (KRW)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF220 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+9UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 112, ambulance 119, fire 119112
Elevation38 m6 m
Main airportIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinationsThessaloniki Macedonia International Airport (SKG)14 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureSeoulThessaloniki
City population9,668,465309,617
People per km²15,97316,042
Museums within 10 km8031
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km51
Distinct cuisines in the centre15645
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Seoul or Thessaloniki 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.