VacationSelector

Athens or Cancun?

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

Your match

Athens
✓ Best match
68
match

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

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

AthensCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 49 points.49
AthensCancun
Score4897
Swim season months512
Beaches 10 km1423
Coast distance6 km3 km
Water distance6 km3 km
Places to eat. Athens leads by 15 points.15
AthensCancun
Score6954
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,431681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2518
Museums & heritage. Athens leads by 53 points.53
AthensCancun
Score7320
Museums within 10 km1221
Museums within 2 km of centre781
Share of museums within 2 km %64100
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Athens leads by 45 points.45
AthensCancun
Score8136
Drinking venues within 4 km2,718270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,354175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5065
Nightclubs within 4 km13633
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 9 points.9
AthensCancun
Score4554
Protected land share 50 km %59
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5045
Park area within 2 km128 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Athens leads by 39 points.39
AthensCancun
Score7132
Tourist attractions within 2 km682
Park area within 2 km128 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Athens leads by 71 points.71
AthensCancun
Score754
Notable places within 2 km2915
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 2 points.2
AthensCancun
Score7476
Price level global55.854.2
Daily budget€125
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 7 points.7
AthensCancun
Score7481
Monthly daytime high13.4 °C to 34.5 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall6 mm to 86 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months71
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
Athens
13
14
17
21
27
32
34
35
30
24
19
15
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Athens
15
15
15
16
19
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Athens
59
46
41
31
19
7
7
6
24
39
74
86
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Athens
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Athens
5
5
7
8
10
12
13
12
9
7
5
4
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Athens: 1991-2020 normals, Athens / Athenai / Pláka (2.2 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAthensCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 30 m
€115-327
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
10 h 15 m
€634
ATH · 20 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 0 m
€565-638
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 10 m
€162-235
ATH · 20 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 20 m
€95-237
ATH · 20 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
3 h 30 m
€156-172
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€174-212
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€202-223
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
11 h 0 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 55 m
€97-139
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
11 h 30 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

MeasureAthensCancun
Official languageGreekSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112911
Elevation74 m5 m
Main airportAthens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH)20 km from centre171 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureAthensCancun
City population643,452888,797
People per km²16,499
Museums within 10 km881
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre8231
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Athens 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.