VacationSelector

Shanghai or Tampa?

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

Your match

Shanghai
✓ Best match
54
match

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

Tampa
44
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

ShanghaiTampa
Beaches & swimming. Tampa leads by 58 points.58
ShanghaiTampa
Score1775
Swim season months58
Beaches 10 km010
Coast distance18 km1 km
Water distance18 km1 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 18 points.18
ShanghaiTampa
Score4527
Museums within 10 km10813
Museums within 2 km of centre2810
Share of museums within 2 km %2677
Unesco sites within 50 km00
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 12 points.12
ShanghaiTampa
Score4230
Protected land share 50 km %96
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8272
Park area within 2 km83 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 51 points.51
ShanghaiTampa
Score8130
Tourist attractions within 2 km863
Park area within 2 km83 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km105
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 30 points.30
ShanghaiTampa
Score5121
Notable places within 2 km7313
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 36 points.36
ShanghaiTampa
Score7943
Price level global49100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Tampa leads by 10 points.10
ShanghaiTampa
Score6575
Monthly daytime high8.5 °C to 33.2 °C21.5 °C to 32.6 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 216 mm36 mm to 228 mm
Dry months01
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
Tampa
22
23
25
28
31
32
32
33
32
29
26
23
Sea temperature, °C
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Tampa
18
18
20
23
26
28
30
30
29
27
23
20
Rainfall, mm
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Tampa
66
66
64
64
67
187
197
228
156
60
36
65
Daylight, hours per day
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Tampa
11
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4
Tampa
7
7
9
10
11
10
9
10
8
8
7
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre). Tampa: 1991-2020 normals, Tampa International Airport (7.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromShanghaiTampa
TokyoHND, NRT
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 35 m
€178-237
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
12 h 55 m
€606-798
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
14 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 25 m
€163-176
1 stop
TPA · 8 km
DetroitDTW, DET, YIP
14 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 30 m
€115-144
TPA · 8 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
11 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
5 h 25 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
MCO · 125 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
TPA · 8 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 20 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
TPA · 8 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

MeasureShanghaiTampa
Official languagePutonghua
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119911
Elevation4 m30 m
Main airportShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinationsTampa International Airport (TPA)8 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureShanghaiTampa
City population24,870,895384,959
People per km²3,922848
Museums within 10 km446
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre6447
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months8 months

Where else could you go?

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