VacationSelector

Belfast or Montreal?

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, 1 point apart

Belfast
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Montreal
47
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

BelfastMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Belfast leads by 48 points.48
BelfastMontreal
Score480
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km107
Coast distance1 km276 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 18 points.18
BelfastMontreal
Score5674
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4321,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3149
Museums & heritage. Montreal leads by 8 points.8
BelfastMontreal
Score2937
Museums within 10 km1839
Museums within 2 km of centre619
Share of museums within 2 km %3349
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 14 points.14
BelfastMontreal
Score4862
Drinking venues within 4 km5501,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre348493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6349
Nightclubs within 4 km2974
Nature & day trips. Belfast leads by 17 points.17
BelfastMontreal
Score5336
Protected land share 50 km %192
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km68 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 2 points.2
BelfastMontreal
Score4850
Tourist attractions within 2 km1611
Park area within 2 km68 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 14 points.14
BelfastMontreal
Score4256
Notable places within 2 km4398
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Belfast and Montreal are level on 54.
BelfastMontreal
Score5454
Price level global84.984
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Belfast leads by 1 points.1
BelfastMontreal
Score5150
Monthly daytime high6.9 °C to 19 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 89 mm69 mm to 121 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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Belfast
9
8
8
8
9
11
12
13
14
14
12
11
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Belfast
74
62
60
56
55
65
74
86
67
89
87
85
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Belfast
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
7
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Belfast
2
2
3
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
2
2
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

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). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBelfastMontreal
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 15 m
€72-142
BHD · 4 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 50 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
7 h 50 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 50 m
€449-527
1 stop
DUB · 132 km
1 h 15 m
€133-276
YUL · 16 km
EdinburghEDI
55 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
6 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 35 m
no fares
DUB · 132 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
no fares
BHD · 4 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 40 m
no fares
BFS · 20 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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

MeasureBelfastMontreal
Official languageEnglishFrench, English
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation3 m31 m
Main airportGeorge Best Belfast City Airport (BHD)4 km from centre24 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureBelfastMontreal
City population345,0061,895,211
People per km²3,0003,806
Museums within 10 km837
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre4497
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 Montreal 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.