VacationSelector

Belfast or Cancun?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Belfast
48
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

BelfastCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 49 points.49
BelfastCancun
Score4897
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km1023
Coast distance1 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Belfast leads by 2 points.2
BelfastCancun
Score5654
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3118
Museums & heritage. Belfast leads by 9 points.9
BelfastCancun
Score2920
Museums within 10 km181
Museums within 2 km of centre61
Share of museums within 2 km %33100
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Belfast leads by 12 points.12
BelfastCancun
Score4836
Drinking venues within 4 km550270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6365
Nightclubs within 4 km2933
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
BelfastCancun
Score5354
Protected land share 50 km %199
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %6545
Park area within 2 km68 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 16 points.16
BelfastCancun
Score4832
Tourist attractions within 2 km162
Park area within 2 km68 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Belfast leads by 38 points.38
BelfastCancun
Score424
Notable places within 2 km435
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
BelfastCancun
Score5476
Price level global84.954.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 30 points.30
BelfastCancun
Score5181
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 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
Belfast
7
8
10
12
15
18
19
19
17
13
10
7
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Cancun
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). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 0 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 35 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
6 h 15 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
RaleighRDU
7 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
€66-101
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
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

MeasureBelfastCancun
Official languageEnglishSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation3 m5 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastCancun
City population345,006888,797
People per km²3,000
Museums within 10 km81
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre4431
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone12 months

Where else could you go?

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