VacationSelector

Belfast or Maastricht?

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 nightlife with your weighting.

Maastricht
41
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

BelfastMaastricht
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BelfastMaastricht
Score480
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km106
Coast distance1 km118 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Belfast leads by 8 points.8
BelfastMaastricht
Score5648
Restaurants within 2 km of centre432338
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3122
Museums & heritage. Maastricht leads by 24 points.24
BelfastMaastricht
Score2953
Museums within 10 km1823
Museums within 2 km of centre613
Share of museums within 2 km %3357
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Belfast leads by 18 points.18
BelfastMaastricht
Score4830
Drinking venues within 4 km550223
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348182
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6382
Nightclubs within 4 km2913
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 16 points.16
BelfastMaastricht
Score5337
Protected land share 50 km %1919
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1311
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares33 hectares
Good for families. Belfast leads by 2 points.2
BelfastMaastricht
Score4846
Tourist attractions within 2 km1615
Park area within 2 km68 hectares33 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km25
Sights concentration. Belfast leads by 6 points.6
BelfastMaastricht
Score4236
Notable places within 2 km4332
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Maastricht leads by 4 points.4
BelfastMaastricht
Score5458
Price level global84.979.2
Daily budget€181
Year-round weather. Maastricht leads by 8 points.8
BelfastMaastricht
Score5159
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C5.7 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm41 mm to 84 mm
Dry months00
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
Maastricht
6
7
11
15
19
22
24
24
20
15
10
6
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Maastricht
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Maastricht
64
58
55
41
58
69
73
84
58
65
62
74
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Maastricht
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Maastricht
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2

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). Maastricht: 1991-2020 normals, Maastricht Airport Zuid Limburg (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastMaastricht
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
FaroFAO
3 h 0 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 55 m
€223
EIN · 70 km
KrakowKRK
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
1 h 50 m
€109-130
1 stop
EIN · 70 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
LGG · 29 km
IbizaIBZ
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
BudapestBUD
2 h 55 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 55 m
€106-231
EIN · 70 km
ValenciaVLC
2 h 35 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
2 h 20 m
€155
EIN · 70 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 25 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
EIN · 70 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

MeasureBelfastMaastricht
Official languageEnglishDutch
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112 or 911
Elevation3 m49 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsMaastricht Aachen Airport (MST)9 km from centre5 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastMaastricht
City population345,006120,227
People per km²3,0002,000
Museums within 10 km821
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre4433
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 Maastricht 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.