VacationSelector

Alicante or Maastricht?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Maastricht
41
match

Wins on museums & heritage and 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.

AlicanteMaastricht
Beaches & swimming. Alicante leads by 77 points.77
AlicanteMaastricht
Score770
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km336
Coast distance1 km118 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Alicante leads by 18 points.18
AlicanteMaastricht
Score6648
Restaurants within 2 km of centre867338
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3122
Museums & heritage. Maastricht leads by 11 points.11
AlicanteMaastricht
Score4253
Museums within 10 km1423
Museums within 2 km of centre1113
Share of museums within 2 km %7957
Unesco sites within 50 km25
Nightlife. Alicante leads by 21 points.21
AlicanteMaastricht
Score5130
Drinking venues within 4 km591223
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre488182
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8382
Nightclubs within 4 km5413
Nature & day trips. Alicante leads by 3 points.3
AlicanteMaastricht
Score4037
Protected land share 50 km %719
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %59100
Park area within 2 km60 hectares33 hectares
Good for families. Maastricht leads by 4 points.4
AlicanteMaastricht
Score4246
Tourist attractions within 2 km1315
Park area within 2 km60 hectares33 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km15
Sights concentration. Maastricht leads by 10 points.10
AlicanteMaastricht
Score2636
Notable places within 2 km1832
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Alicante leads by 13 points.13
AlicanteMaastricht
Score7158
Price level global60.879.2
Daily budget€122€181
Year-round weather. Alicante leads by 28 points.28
AlicanteMaastricht
Score8759
Monthly daytime high17 °C to 31.1 °C5.7 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 52 mm41 mm to 84 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
Maastricht
6
7
11
15
19
22
24
24
20
15
10
6
Sea temperature, °C
Alicante
15
14
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
22
19
16
Maastricht
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Alicante
21
18
25
34
21
8
3
12
52
32
34
23
Maastricht
64
58
55
41
58
69
73
84
58
65
62
74
Daylight, hours per day
Alicante
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Maastricht
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Alicante
6
6
8
8
10
10
11
10
8
7
6
6
Maastricht
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Alicante: 1991-2020 normals, Alicante (2.8 km from centre). Maastricht: 1991-2020 normals, Maastricht Airport Zuid Limburg (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAlicanteMaastricht
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€46-56
ALC · 10 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 10 m
€62-93
ALC · 10 km
2 h 0 m
€148-192
1 stop
EIN · 70 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
3 h 20 m
€88-91
ALC · 10 km
1 h 55 m
€123-157
1 stop
EIN · 70 km
ManchesterMAN
2 h 40 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
CRL · 97 km
BudapestBUD
2 h 55 m
€103-155
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
1 h 55 m
€106-231
EIN · 70 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 0 m
€102-136
1 stop
ALC · 10 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 0 m
€62-83
ALC · 10 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
IbizaIBZ
55 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
MarrakechRAK
1 h 50 m
no fares
ALC · 10 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 30 m
no fares
VLC · 127 km
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 85 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

MeasureAlicanteMaastricht
Official languageSpanishDutch
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 911
Elevation3 m49 m
Main airportAlicante-Elche Miguel Hernández Airport (ALC)10 km from centre124 non-stop destinationsMaastricht Aachen Airport (MST)9 km from centre5 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureAlicanteMaastricht
City population366,221120,227
People per km²1,8192,000
Museums within 10 km821
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km25
Distinct cuisines in the centre5233
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 Maastricht 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.