VacationSelector

Shanghai or York?

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.

York
41
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

ShanghaiYork
Beaches & swimming. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
ShanghaiYork
Score170
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km02
Coast distance18 km50 km
Water distance18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. York leads by 1 points.1
ShanghaiYork
Score4546
Museums within 10 km10818
Museums within 2 km of centre2816
Share of museums within 2 km %2689
Unesco sites within 50 km02
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 9 points.9
ShanghaiYork
Score4233
Protected land share 50 km %917
Landscape blanket share 50 km %016
Land share of disc %8295
Park area within 2 km83 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 38 points.38
ShanghaiYork
Score8143
Tourist attractions within 2 km8613
Park area within 2 km83 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km103
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 12 points.12
ShanghaiYork
Score5139
Notable places within 2 km7337
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 25 points.25
ShanghaiYork
Score7954
Price level global4984.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 9 points.9
ShanghaiYork
Score6556
Monthly daytime high8.5 °C to 33.2 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 216 mm39 mm to 66 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
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4
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. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromShanghaiYork
BeijingPEK, PKX
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
10 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
BarcelonaBCN
12 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
14 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
GenevaGVA
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
Hong KongHKG
2 h 10 m
€153-159
PVG · 33 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
5 h 10 m
€274-364
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
13 h 35 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
ViennaVIE
10 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
DublinDUB
11 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 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

MeasureShanghaiYork
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112 or 999
Elevation4 m25 m
Main airportShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureShanghaiYork
City population24,870,895208,400
People per km²3,922766
Museums within 10 km4424
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre6454
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months

Where else could you go?

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