VacationSelector

Athens or Lyon?

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 beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

Lyon
52
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

AthensLyon
Beaches & swimming. Athens leads by 48 points.48
AthensLyon
Score480
Swim season months50
Beaches 10 km1426
Coast distance6 km253 km
Water distance6 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 10 points.10
AthensLyon
Score6979
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4311,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2540
Museums & heritage. Athens leads by 18 points.18
AthensLyon
Score7355
Museums within 10 km12253
Museums within 2 km of centre7825
Share of museums within 2 km %6447
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Athens leads by 23 points.23
AthensLyon
Score8158
Drinking venues within 4 km2,718866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,354611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5071
Nightclubs within 4 km13647
Nature & day trips. Athens leads by 12 points.12
AthensLyon
Score4533
Protected land share 50 km %56
Landscape blanket share 50 km %06
Land share of disc %50100
Park area within 2 km128 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Athens leads by 12 points.12
AthensLyon
Score7159
Tourist attractions within 2 km6825
Park area within 2 km128 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Athens leads by 21 points.21
AthensLyon
Score7554
Notable places within 2 km29186
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Athens leads by 12 points.12
AthensLyon
Score7462
Price level global55.873.7
Daily budget€125€160
Year-round weather. Athens leads by 10 points.10
AthensLyon
Score7464
Monthly daytime high13.4 °C to 34.5 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall6 mm to 86 mm43 mm to 101 mm
Dry months70
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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Athens
15
15
15
16
19
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Athens
59
46
41
31
19
7
7
6
24
39
74
86
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Athens
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Athens
5
5
7
8
10
12
13
12
9
7
5
4
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

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). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAthensLyon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
3 h 30 m
€115-327
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
3 h 10 m
€162-235
ATH · 20 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 20 m
€95-237
ATH · 20 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
HeraklionHER
1 h 0 m
€84-111
ATH · 20 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 55 m
€97-139
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 50 m
€174-212
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
3 h 15 m
€202-223
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
2 h 5 m
€125-147
ATH · 20 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
GNB · 59 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
10 h 0 m
€565-638
1 stop
ATH · 20 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
9 h 35 m
no fares
ATH · 20 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 111 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

MeasureAthensLyon
Official languageGreekFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+2, UTC+3 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation74 m160 m
Main airportAthens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport (ATH)20 km from centre171 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year15 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureAthensLyon
City population643,452519,127
People per km²16,49910,838
Museums within 10 km8842
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre82148
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 Athens or Lyon 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.