VacationSelector

Alicante or Lucerne?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

AlicanteLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteLucerne
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km3316
Coast distance1 km669 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 19 points.19
AlicanteLucerne
Score6647
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3125
Museums & heritage. Alicante leads by 2 points.2
AlicanteLucerne
Score4240
Museums within 10 km1423
Museums within 2 km of centre1113
Share of museums within 2 km %7957
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 23 points.23
AlicanteLucerne
Score5128
Drinking venues within 4 km591202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8375
Nightclubs within 4 km5411
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 15 points.15
AlicanteLucerne
Score4025
Protected land share 50 km %77
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Alicante leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteLucerne
Score4238
Tourist attractions within 2 km1315
Park area within 2 km60 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Lucerne leads by 9 points.9
AlicanteLucerne
Score2635
Notable places within 2 km1829
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 36 points.36
AlicanteLucerne
Score7135
Price level global60.8110.5
Daily budget€122€248
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 34 points.34
AlicanteLucerne
Score8753
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm60 mm to 128 mm
Dry months110
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
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Lucerne
2
3
5
6
6
7
7
7
5
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). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteLucerne
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 35 m
€150-169
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 25 m
€234-276
ZRH · 49 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
1 h 40 m
€114-151
ZRH · 49 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
2 h 25 m
€102-119
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
PalmaPMI
1 h 0 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 50 m
€84-103
ZRH · 49 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 5 m
€85-109
ALC · 10 km
1 h 15 m
€163-196
ZRH · 49 km
MadridMAD
1 h 5 m
€72-86
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
€158-220
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
BSL · 85 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 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

MeasureAlicanteLucerne
Official languageSpanishFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation3 m436 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteLucerne
City population366,22186,234
People per km²1,8192,963
Museums within 10 km814
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre5246
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 Alicante or Lucerne 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. 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.