VacationSelector

Seoul or York?

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 museums & heritage and nightlife with your weighting.

York
41
match

Wins on 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.

SeoulYork
Beaches & swimming. Seoul leads by 15 points.15
SeoulYork
Score150
Swim season months20
Beaches 10 km12
Coast distance28 km50 km
Water distance28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 31 points.31
SeoulYork
Score8554
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,559361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3231
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 37 points.37
SeoulYork
Score8346
Museums within 10 km20318
Museums within 2 km of centre9016
Share of museums within 2 km %4489
Unesco sites within 50 km52
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 37 points.37
SeoulYork
Score8043
Drinking venues within 4 km3,291450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,630353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5078
Nightclubs within 4 km2914
Nature & day trips. York leads by 1 points.1
SeoulYork
Score3233
Protected land share 50 km %117
Landscape blanket share 50 km %016
Land share of disc %9595
Park area within 2 km126 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 36 points.36
SeoulYork
Score7943
Tourist attractions within 2 km6213
Park area within 2 km126 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km83
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 20 points.20
SeoulYork
Score5939
Notable places within 2 km11837
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Seoul leads by 18 points.18
SeoulYork
Score7254
Price level global59.484.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Seoul leads by 5 points.5
SeoulYork
Score6156
Monthly daytime high2 °C to 30 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall18 mm to 422 mm39 mm to 66 mm
Dry months41
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
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Seoul
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
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5
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. Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSeoulYork
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 55 m
€680-750
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
Hong KongHKG
3 h 5 m
€172-189
ICN · 49 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
1 h 45 m
€198-221
ICN · 49 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
1 h 40 m
€197-199
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
5 h 0 m
€176-202
ICN · 49 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
9 h 45 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 10 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 15 m
€632-735
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
Abu DhabiAUH
8 h 45 m
€591-679
2 stops
ICN · 49 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 2026-08 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

MeasureSeoulYork
Official languageKorean, Korean Sign LanguageEnglish
CurrencyWon (KRW)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF220 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+9UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 112, ambulance 119, fire 119112 or 999
Elevation38 m25 m
Main airportIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year18 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureSeoulYork
City population9,668,465208,400
People per km²15,973766
Museums within 10 km8024
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km52
Distinct cuisines in the centre15654
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months

Where else could you go?

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