VacationSelector

Bangkok or Cancun?

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

Your match

Bangkok
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on nightlife and sights concentration 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.

BangkokCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 57 points.57
BangkokCancun
Score4097
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km023
Coast distance23 km3 km
Water distance23 km3 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 29 points.29
BangkokCancun
Score8354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3,957681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2618
Museums & heritage. Bangkok leads by 26 points.26
BangkokCancun
Score4620
Museums within 10 km1031
Museums within 2 km of centre301
Share of museums within 2 km %29100
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 47 points.47
BangkokCancun
Score8336
Drinking venues within 4 km3,383270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,396175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4165
Nightclubs within 4 km7233
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 3 points.3
BangkokCancun
Score5154
Protected land share 50 km %9
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8345
Park area within 2 km42 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Bangkok leads by 25 points.25
BangkokCancun
Score5732
Tourist attractions within 2 km312
Park area within 2 km42 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. Bangkok leads by 44 points.44
BangkokCancun
Score484
Notable places within 2 km625
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Bangkok leads by 17 points.17
BangkokCancun
Score9376
Price level global29.754.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 25 points.25
BangkokCancun
Score5681
Monthly daytime high32.4 °C to 35.8 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall7 mm to 331 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months31
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
Bangkok
33
34
35
36
35
34
34
33
33
33
33
32
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBangkokCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 55 m
€438-523
BKK · 26 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 20 m
€646-679
1 stop
BKK · 26 km
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
12 h 40 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
14 h 35 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 15 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 45 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
10 h 25 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

MeasureBangkokCancun
Official languageThaiSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyBaht (THB)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsABCF220 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC-5
Emergency numberPolice 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199911
Elevation2 m5 m
Main airportSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBangkokCancun
City population5,676,648888,797
People per km²3,619
Museums within 10 km591
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre9131
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bangkok 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). 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. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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.