Planning Tools
Nineteen calculators, quizzes and lookups built from the same on-the-ground reporting as our written guides — real 2026 taxi tariffs, current metro fares, month-by-month rainfall and heat, neighbourhood-level safety notes, and the prices we actually paid for beach chairs, botecos and Uber rides. Pick a tool below; each one links through to the full guide behind its numbers.
Before you book
The trip planner, "how many days?" quiz, best-month climate chart, area finder and visa checker settle the four decisions that shape the whole trip: how long to stay, when to come, which neighbourhood to sleep in, and what paperwork you need at immigration.
While you budget
The budget calculator, BRL converter, taxi fare estimator, tipping calculator and flight deal finder use current Rio prices, so you can sanity-check a daily spend in reais before you commit — and know when a quoted airport fare is double what it should be.
Once you are here
Beach finder, restaurant finder, metro route planner, safety lookup, sunrise/sunset times, packing list, Portuguese phrasebook and — in Carnaval season — the bloco finder answer the day-to-day questions you only get once you are standing on the sand.
Trip Planner
Answer a few questions to get a curated itinerary for Rio.
How these tools are built
Every number in these tools comes from a source we can point at. Taxi and Uber estimates start from Rio's regulated Tarifa 1 and Tarifa 2 meter rates plus the surcharges drivers actually apply on the Linha Vermelha and at GIG arrivals. Metro routes follow the current MetrôRio Line 1, 2 and 4 map, including the Botafogo interchange and the Line 4 Barra extension. Climate figures use long-run monthly averages for the city, not a single freak year — which is why February looks hotter and January wetter than most tourists expect. Currency conversion is indicative rather than live: use it to think in reais, then check your bank's spread before you draw cash.
The quizzes are editorial, not algorithmic. When the beach finder sends a family to Leme rather than Ipanema's Posto 9, that is a judgement about calm water, kiosk spacing and how far you have to walk with a pushchair — the same judgement we make in the written guides. We would rather give you one honest recommendation with its trade-off attached than a ranked list of everywhere.
What these tools will not do
They do not sell you anything directly, they do not store the answers you type, and they do not pretend to be live systems. A fare estimate is not a quote, a safety lookup is not a real-time incident feed, and a packing list cannot see next week's forecast. Treat each result as a well-informed starting point, then confirm the detail that matters most — a hotel's exact street, a tour's departure point, a museum's closing day — with the operator before you rely on it.
Prefer reading to clicking? Start with the complete Rio trip-planning guide, where to stay in Rio, getting around Rio, or the money, cards and Pix guide.