VacationSelector

Boston or Cancun?

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

Your match

Boston
✓ Best match
55
match

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

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money 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.

BostonCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 37 points.37
BostonCancun
Score6097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km6823
Coast distance1 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Boston leads by 19 points.19
BostonCancun
Score7354
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,452681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3218
Museums & heritage. Boston leads by 23 points.23
BostonCancun
Score4320
Museums within 10 km791
Museums within 2 km of centre271
Share of museums within 2 km %34100
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Boston leads by 22 points.22
BostonCancun
Score5836
Drinking venues within 4 km886270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre513175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5865
Nightclubs within 4 km4333
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
BostonCancun
Score5354
Protected land share 50 km %129
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7745
Park area within 2 km116 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Boston leads by 21 points.21
BostonCancun
Score5332
Tourist attractions within 2 km282
Park area within 2 km116 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. Boston leads by 54 points.54
BostonCancun
Score584
Notable places within 2 km1115
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
BostonCancun
Score4376
Price level global10054.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 25 points.25
BostonCancun
Score5681
Monthly daytime high2.9 °C to 28 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall79 mm to 107 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
Boston
3
4
8
14
19
25
28
27
23
17
11
6
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Boston
5
3
4
6
10
15
18
19
17
14
10
8
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Boston
84
79
105
91
83
99
82
80
90
101
93
107
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Boston
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Boston
5
5
6
7
8
8
9
9
7
5
5
4
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Boston: 1991-2020 normals, Boston Logan International (3.5 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBostonCancun
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
1 h 0 m
€192-203
BOS · 4 km
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€211-283
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
2 h 20 m
€176-196
BOS · 4 km
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€536-548
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
2 h 45 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
1 h 50 m
€216-378
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
5 h 0 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
RaleighRDU
1 h 50 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
Kansas CityMCI, MKC
3 h 0 m
€266-304
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
5 h 35 m
€289-344
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
DenverDEN, APA
4 h 0 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
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

MeasureBostonCancun
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number911911
Elevation43 m5 m
Main airportBoston Logan International Airport (BOS)4 km from centre144 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBostonCancun
City population675,647888,797
People per km²2,910
Museums within 10 km511
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre7431
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 Boston 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.