VacationSelector

Sydney or Thessaloniki?

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

Your match

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on places to eat and good for families with your weighting.

Thessaloniki
59
match

Wins on value for money 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.

SydneyThessaloniki
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 5 points.5
SydneyThessaloniki
Score6055
Swim season months65
Beaches 10 km1604
Coast distance7 km0 km
Water distance7 km0 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 28 points.28
SydneyThessaloniki
Score7850
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,205640
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3115
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 2 points.2
SydneyThessaloniki
Score5149
Museums within 10 km4434
Museums within 2 km of centre2022
Share of museums within 2 km %4565
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 8 points.8
SydneyThessaloniki
Score7567
Drinking venues within 4 km2,0501,407
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,405805
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6957
Nightclubs within 4 km12061
Nature & day trips. Thessaloniki leads by 7 points.7
SydneyThessaloniki
Score5865
Protected land share 50 km %1025
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5283
Park area within 2 km115 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 23 points.23
SydneyThessaloniki
Score6441
Tourist attractions within 2 km3716
Park area within 2 km115 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 4 points.4
SydneyThessaloniki
Score6056
Notable places within 2 km12398
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Thessaloniki leads by 24 points.24
SydneyThessaloniki
Score5074
Price level global90.255.8
Daily budget—€125
Year-round weather. Sydney leads by 9 points.9
SydneyThessaloniki
Score8172
Monthly daytime high17.7 °C to 27.7 °C9.7 °C to 32.1 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 121 mm21 mm to 56 mm
Dry months09
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
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Thessaloniki
10
11
15
19
25
30
32
32
27
21
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Thessaloniki
14
13
13
15
19
23
26
27
25
21
18
15
Rainfall, mm
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Thessaloniki
35
32
38
36
44
30
23
21
33
41
38
56
Daylight, hours per day
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Thessaloniki
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8
Thessaloniki
4
4
6
6
9
11
11
10
8
6
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre). Thessaloniki: 1991-2020 normals, Thessaloniki Airport (14 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSydneyThessaloniki
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
3 h 15 m
€95-156
SKG · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
18 h 15 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
1 h 15 m
€151-156
SKG · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
19 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
1 h 45 m
€117-203
1 stop
SKG · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
20 h 35 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
2 h 50 m
€98-154
1 stop
SKG · 14 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

MeasureSydneyThessaloniki
Official languageEnglishGreek
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number000112
Elevation6 m6 m
Main airportSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinationsThessaloniki Macedonia International Airport (SKG)14 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureSydneyThessaloniki
City population5,450,496309,617
People per km²44916,042
Museums within 10 km3831
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre7945
Swim season, months above 21 °C6 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Sydney or Thessaloniki 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 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.