VacationSelector

Shanghai or Tirana?

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 museums & heritage with your weighting.

Tirana
51
match

Wins on nature & day trips and value for money 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.

ShanghaiTirana
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai and Tirana are level on 17.
ShanghaiTirana
Score1717
Swim season months55
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance18 km26 km
Water distance18 km26 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 20 points.20
ShanghaiTirana
Score4525
Museums within 10 km10812
Museums within 2 km of centre288
Share of museums within 2 km %2667
Unesco sites within 50 km00
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Tirana leads by 7 points.7
ShanghaiTirana
Score4249
Protected land share 50 km %911
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %8283
Park area within 2 km83 hectares147 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 29 points.29
ShanghaiTirana
Score8152
Tourist attractions within 2 km8621
Park area within 2 km83 hectares147 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km100
Sights concentration. Tirana leads by 2 points.2
ShanghaiTirana
Score5153
Notable places within 2 km7383
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Tirana leads by 5 points.5
ShanghaiTirana
Score7984
Price level global4942.6
Daily budget€76
Year-round weather. Tirana leads by 2 points.2
ShanghaiTirana
Score6567
Monthly daytime high8.5 °C to 33.2 °C11.6 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 216 mm43 mm to 172 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
Tirana
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Tirana
15
14
14
16
19
23
24
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Tirana
143
117
116
103
84
66
43
55
78
114
172
148
Daylight, hours per day
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Tirana
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4
Tirana
4
4
5
6
9
10
12
11
9
7
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre). Tirana: 1961-1990 normals, Tirana (3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromShanghaiTirana
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 30 m
€73-102
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
2 h 55 m
€62-138
TIA · 13 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 50 m
€33-74
TIA · 13 km
AthensATH
10 h 45 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 15 m
€73-127
TIA · 13 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 35 m
€100-109
TIA · 13 km
CopenhagenCPH
10 h 25 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 35 m
€109-148
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
BudapestBUD
10 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 25 m
€58-106
TIA · 13 km
AlmatyALA
5 h 30 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
6 h 5 m
€370-455
3 stops
TGD · 124 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
TIA · 13 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

MeasureShanghaiTirana
Official languagePutonghuaAlbanian
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Lek (ALL)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112
Elevation4 m110 m
Main airportShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinationsTirana International Airport Mother Teresa (TIA)13 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureShanghaiTirana
City population24,870,895389,323
People per km²3,9229,314
Museums within 10 km4411
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre6446
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Shanghai or Tirana 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.