VacationSelector

Alicante or Inverness?

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

Your match

Alicante
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Inverness
25
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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.

AlicanteInverness
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 49 points.49
AlicanteInverness
Score7728
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km331
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 45 points.45
AlicanteInverness
Score6621
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867114
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3111
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 22 points.22
AlicanteInverness
Score4220
Museums within 10 km146
Museums within 2 km of centre115
Share of museums within 2 km %7983
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 36 points.36
AlicanteInverness
Score5115
Drinking venues within 4 km591113
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre48898
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8387
Nightclubs within 4 km544
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 31 points.31
AlicanteInverness
Score409
Protected land share 50 km %712
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %5988
Park area within 2 km60 hectares3 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 42 points.42
AlicanteInverness
Score420
Tourist attractions within 2 km133
Park area within 2 km60 hectares3 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Alicante leads by 2 points.2
AlicanteInverness
Score2624
Notable places within 2 km1816
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 17 points.17
AlicanteInverness
Score7154
Price level global60.884.9
Daily budget€122—
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 35 points.35
AlicanteInverness
Score8752
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C6.6 °C to 18.9 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm40 mm to 72 mm
Dry months111
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
Alicante
17
18
20
22
24
28
30
31
29
25
21
18
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteInverness
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
BristolBRS
2 h 25 m
€66-103
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
BirminghamBHX
2 h 30 m
€69-172
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
GlasgowGLA, PIK
3 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
WIC · 127 km
DublinDUB
2 h 45 m
€98-122
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
BelfastBFS, BHD
2 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
INV · 12 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

MeasureAlicanteInverness
Official languageSpanishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation3 m7 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteInverness
City population366,22147,380
People per km²1,8192,289
Museums within 10 km83
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre5215
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Alicante or Inverness 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.