VacationSelector

Atlanta or Cancun?

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

Your match

Atlanta
40
match

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

Cancun
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money 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.

AtlantaCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
AtlantaCancun
Score097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km023
Coast distance373 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Atlanta leads by 5 points.5
AtlantaCancun
Score5954
Restaurants within 2 km of centre739681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2318
Museums & heritage. Atlanta leads by 15 points.15
AtlantaCancun
Score3520
Museums within 10 km411
Museums within 2 km of centre161
Share of museums within 2 km %39100
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Atlanta leads by 13 points.13
AtlantaCancun
Score4936
Drinking venues within 4 km531270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre284175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5365
Nightclubs within 4 km4633
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 23 points.23
AtlantaCancun
Score3154
Protected land share 50 km %19
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km113 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Atlanta and Cancun are level on 32.
AtlantaCancun
Score3232
Tourist attractions within 2 km22
Park area within 2 km113 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Atlanta leads by 36 points.36
AtlantaCancun
Score404
Notable places within 2 km395
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
AtlantaCancun
Score4376
Price level global10054.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
AtlantaCancun
Score6781
Monthly daytime high12 °C to 32 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall80 mm to 121 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
Atlanta
12
14
19
23
27
30
32
32
29
23
18
13
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Atlanta
No coastline within reach
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Atlanta
116
116
119
99
90
117
121
109
97
80
102
116
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Atlanta
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
10
10
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Atlanta: 1991-2020 normals, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta (29.2 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromAtlantaCancun
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€152-200
ATL · 14 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
1 h 50 m
€161-221
ATL · 14 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
2 h 5 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
HoustonIAH, HOU
2 h 0 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€286-331
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
3 h 10 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 20 m
€165-240
1 stop
ATL · 14 km
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 5 m
€69-120
ATL · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
2 h 35 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
Kansas CityMCI, MKC
2 h 0 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 35 m
no fares
ATL · 14 km
10 h 0 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 2026-09 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

MeasureAtlantaCancun
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number911911
Elevation225 m5 m
Main airportHartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)14 km from centre238 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureAtlantaCancun
City population498,715888,797
People per km²1,433
Museums within 10 km271
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre5631
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Atlanta 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.