VacationSelector

Belfast or Calgary?

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

Your match

Belfast
✓ Best match
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Calgary
38
match

Wins on places to eat 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.

BelfastCalgary
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BelfastCalgary
Score480
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km104
Coast distance1 km649 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Calgary leads by 10 points.10
BelfastCalgary
Score5666
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432749
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3136
Museums & heritage. Belfast leads by 20 points.20
BelfastCalgary
Score299
Museums within 10 km188
Museums within 2 km of centre63
Share of museums within 2 km %3338
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Belfast leads by 4 points.4
BelfastCalgary
Score4844
Drinking venues within 4 km550465
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348343
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6374
Nightclubs within 4 km2919
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 17 points.17
BelfastCalgary
Score5336
Protected land share 50 km %194
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares142 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 7 points.7
BelfastCalgary
Score4841
Tourist attractions within 2 km163
Park area within 2 km68 hectares142 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Belfast leads by 3 points.3
BelfastCalgary
Score4239
Notable places within 2 km4337
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Belfast and Calgary are level on 54.
BelfastCalgary
Score5454
Price level global84.984
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Calgary leads by 6 points.6
BelfastCalgary
Score5157
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C-0.7 °C to 24.8 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm9 mm to 106 mm
Dry months08
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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Calgary
0
-1
4
11
16
20
25
23
19
12
4
0
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Calgary
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Calgary
9
13
19
28
58
106
44
47
33
21
17
17
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Calgary
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Calgary
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Belfast: 1991-2020 normals, Belfast / Aldergrove Airport (19.4 km from centre). Calgary: 1991-2020 normals, Calgary Int'l CS (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastCalgary
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
8 h 55 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
4 h 30 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
3 h 50 m
€182-359
1 stop
YYC · 9 km
EdinburghEDI
55 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
8 h 20 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
6 h 15 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
4 h 10 m
€170-221
YYC · 9 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 35 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
9 h 5 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 30 m
€77-88
1 stop
YYC · 9 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
9 h 15 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
YYC · 9 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
5 h 30 m
no fares
YYC · 9 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

MeasureBelfastCalgary
Official languageEnglishFrench, English
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-7, UTC-6 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation3 m1,045 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsCalgary International Airport (YYC)9 km from centre106 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastCalgary
City population345,0061,306,784
People per km²3,0001,583
Museums within 10 km813
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre4467
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Belfast or Calgary 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). 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. 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.