VacationSelector

Bologna 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

Bologna
52
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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.

BolognaCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
BolognaCancun
Score097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km223
Coast distance74 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Bologna leads by 4 points.4
BolognaCancun
Score5854
Restaurants within 2 km of centre822681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2018
Museums & heritage. Bologna leads by 47 points.47
BolognaCancun
Score6720
Museums within 10 km581
Museums within 2 km of centre431
Share of museums within 2 km %74100
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Bologna leads by 17 points.17
BolognaCancun
Score5336
Drinking venues within 4 km720270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre531175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7465
Nightclubs within 4 km3033
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 15 points.15
BolognaCancun
Score3954
Protected land share 50 km %79
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km119 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Bologna leads by 23 points.23
BolognaCancun
Score5532
Tourist attractions within 2 km322
Park area within 2 km119 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Bologna leads by 56 points.56
BolognaCancun
Score604
Notable places within 2 km1205
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
BolognaCancun
Score6876
Price level global64.954.2
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
BolognaCancun
Score6781
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 31.5 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 75 mm38 mm to 224 mm
Dry months51
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
Bologna
7
10
15
19
24
29
32
32
26
19
13
8
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Bologna
No coastline within reach
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Bologna
36
36
49
54
50
37
34
40
75
75
70
58
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Bologna
9
10
12
13
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Bologna
3
4
6
7
8
10
11
10
7
5
3
3
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Bologna: 1991-2020 normals, Bologna / Borgo Panigale (5.5 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBolognaCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 0 m
€114-267
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
8 h 45 m
no fares
VCE · 138 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€158-262
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
2 h 10 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 30 m
€637-650
VCE · 138 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 40 m
€42-75
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
BLQ · 6 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 50 m
€220-255
1 stop
BLQ · 6 km
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
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 2026-09, 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

MeasureBolognaCancun
Official languageItalianSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112911
Elevation54 m5 m
Main airportBologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport (BLQ)6 km from centre97 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBolognaCancun
City population387,971888,797
People per km²2,754
Museums within 10 km661
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre6231
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Bologna 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.