VacationSelector

Amsterdam or Geneva?

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 beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Geneva
50
match

Wins on 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.

AmsterdamGeneva
Beaches & swimming. Amsterdam leads by 40 points.40
AmsterdamGeneva
Score400
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km3343
Coast distance24 km279 km
Water distance24 km—
Places to eat. Amsterdam leads by 13 points.13
AmsterdamGeneva
Score8370
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,9571,028
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4435
Museums & heritage. Amsterdam leads by 28 points.28
AmsterdamGeneva
Score8052
Museums within 10 km9835
Museums within 2 km of centre6920
Share of museums within 2 km %7057
Unesco sites within 50 km52
Nightlife. Amsterdam leads by 20 points.20
AmsterdamGeneva
Score7050
Drinking venues within 4 km1,543549
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,078427
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7078
Nightclubs within 4 km11460
Nature & day trips. Amsterdam leads by 1 points.1
AmsterdamGeneva
Score6059
Protected land share 50 km %2127
Landscape blanket share 50 km %021
Land share of disc %82100
Park area within 2 km49 hectares182 hectares
Good for families. Amsterdam leads by 3 points.3
AmsterdamGeneva
Score6865
Tourist attractions within 2 km7428
Park area within 2 km49 hectares182 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Amsterdam leads by 12 points.12
AmsterdamGeneva
Score6856
Notable places within 2 km19699
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Amsterdam leads by 23 points.23
AmsterdamGeneva
Score5835
Price level global79.2110.5
Daily budget€181€248
Year-round weather. Geneva leads by 2 points.2
AmsterdamGeneva
Score5759
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.1 °C5.1 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 85 mm55 mm to 94 mm
Dry months00
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
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Amsterdam
6
5
6
8
12
15
17
19
17
15
11
8
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Amsterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Daylight, hours per day
Amsterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Amsterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Amsterdam: 1991-2020 normals, De Bilt (35.3 km from centre). Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAmsterdamGeneva
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€93-112
AMS · 12 km
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 10 m
€130-171
AMS · 12 km
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€178-300
AMS · 12 km
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 50 m
€188-239
AMS · 12 km
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€166-175
AMS · 12 km
2 h 55 m
€147-338
GVA · 5 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
€160-183
AMS · 12 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 15 m
€145-187
AMS · 12 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€318-346
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
6 h 25 m
€318-351
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 5 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

MeasureAmsterdamGeneva
Official languageDutchFrench, 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 number112 or 911112
Elevation-2 m403 m
Main airportAmsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS)12 km from centre287 non-stop destinationsGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureAmsterdamGeneva
City population921,468209,061
People per km²4,20813,148
Museums within 10 km10135
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km52
Distinct cuisines in the centre9880
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Amsterdam or Geneva 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.