VacationSelector

Shanghai or Sydney?

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

Your match

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on value for money and good for families with your weighting.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
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.

ShanghaiSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 43 points.43
ShanghaiSydney
Score1760
Swim season months56
Beaches 10 km0160
Coast distance18 km7 km
Water distance18 km7 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 6 points.6
ShanghaiSydney
Score4551
Museums within 10 km10844
Museums within 2 km of centre2820
Share of museums within 2 km %2645
Unesco sites within 50 km02
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Sydney leads by 16 points.16
ShanghaiSydney
Score4258
Protected land share 50 km %910
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8252
Park area within 2 km83 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
ShanghaiSydney
Score8164
Tourist attractions within 2 km8637
Park area within 2 km83 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km102
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 9 points.9
ShanghaiSydney
Score5160
Notable places within 2 km73123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 29 points.29
ShanghaiSydney
Score7950
Price level global4990.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 16 points.16
ShanghaiSydney
Score6581
Monthly daytime high8.5 °C to 33.2 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 216 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months00
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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromShanghaiSydney
TokyoHND, NRT
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 35 m
€216-247
PVG · 33 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 40 m
€173-183
PVG · 33 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 10 m
€274-364
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 10 m
€153-159
PVG · 33 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
ChongqingCKG, CQW
2 h 25 m
€175-196
PVG · 33 km
10 h 40 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
11 h 15 m
€518-556
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 55 m
€606-798
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
8 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 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 2026-10, 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

MeasureShanghaiSydney
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119000
Elevation4 m6 m
Main airportShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureShanghaiSydney
City population24,870,8955,450,496
People per km²3,922449
Museums within 10 km4438
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre6479
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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