VacationSelector

Amsterdam or Cancun?

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

Your match

Amsterdam
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

AmsterdamCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 57 points.57
AmsterdamCancun
Score4097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km3323
Coast distance24 km3 km
Water distance24 km3 km
Places to eat. Amsterdam leads by 29 points.29
AmsterdamCancun
Score8354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,957681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4418
Museums & heritage. Amsterdam leads by 60 points.60
AmsterdamCancun
Score8020
Museums within 10 km981
Museums within 2 km of centre691
Share of museums within 2 km %70100
Unesco sites within 50 km50
Nightlife. Amsterdam leads by 34 points.34
AmsterdamCancun
Score7036
Drinking venues within 4 km1,543270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,078175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7065
Nightclubs within 4 km11433
Nature & day trips. Amsterdam leads by 6 points.6
AmsterdamCancun
Score6054
Protected land share 50 km %219
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8245
Park area within 2 km49 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Amsterdam leads by 36 points.36
AmsterdamCancun
Score6832
Tourist attractions within 2 km742
Park area within 2 km49 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Amsterdam leads by 64 points.64
AmsterdamCancun
Score684
Notable places within 2 km1965
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
AmsterdamCancun
Score5876
Price level global79.254.2
Daily budget€181
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 24 points.24
AmsterdamCancun
Score5781
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.1 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 85 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months01
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
Amsterdam
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
7
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Amsterdam
6
5
6
8
12
15
17
19
17
15
11
8
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Amsterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Amsterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Amsterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Amsterdam: 1991-2020 normals, De Bilt (35.3 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAmsterdamCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€93-112
AMS · 12 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 45 m
€458-478
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
11 h 30 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
€160-183
AMS · 12 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
€69-96
AMS · 12 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€178-300
AMS · 12 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 50 m
€188-239
AMS · 12 km
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 10 m
€130-171
AMS · 12 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€166-175
AMS · 12 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 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

MeasureAmsterdamCancun
Official languageDutchSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112 or 911911
Elevation-2 m5 m
Main airportAmsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS)12 km from centre287 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureAmsterdamCancun
City population921,468888,797
People per km²4,208
Museums within 10 km1011
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km50
Distinct cuisines in the centre9831
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Amsterdam or Cancun 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.