VacationSelector

Brussels or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Brussels
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nightlife with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on 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.

BrusselsOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Brussels and Ottawa are level on 0.
BrusselsOttawa
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km09
Coast distance56 km423 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Brussels leads by 17 points.17
BrusselsOttawa
Score8164
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,779684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4434
Museums & heritage. Brussels leads by 48 points.48
BrusselsOttawa
Score8032
Museums within 10 km12015
Museums within 2 km of centre598
Share of museums within 2 km %4953
Unesco sites within 50 km101
Nightlife. Brussels leads by 24 points.24
BrusselsOttawa
Score6844
Drinking venues within 4 km1,414432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre862303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6170
Nightclubs within 4 km8435
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 10 points.10
BrusselsOttawa
Score3141
Protected land share 50 km %68
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km65 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Brussels leads by 10 points.10
BrusselsOttawa
Score5646
Tourist attractions within 2 km2811
Park area within 2 km65 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Brussels leads by 23 points.23
BrusselsOttawa
Score7350
Notable places within 2 km25471
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Brussels leads by 6 points.6
BrusselsOttawa
Score6054
Price level global76.284
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Brussels leads by 4 points.4
BrusselsOttawa
Score5753
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.3 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall47 mm to 90 mm53 mm to 94 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
Brussels
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
6
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Rainfall, mm
Brussels
77
67
59
47
61
72
80
90
67
71
75
89
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Brussels
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Brussels
2
2
4
6
6
7
7
6
5
4
2
1
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Brussels: 1991-2020 normals, Uccle (5.2 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBrusselsOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 11 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 11 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
8 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
HalifaxYHZ
6 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 11 km
1 h 45 m
€260-457
1 stop
YOW · 12 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBrusselsOttawa
Official languageFrench, German, DutchFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation70 m70 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)11 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBrusselsOttawa
City population195,5461,017,449
People per km²5,908366
Museums within 10 km10520
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km101
Distinct cuisines in the centre10962

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Brussels or Ottawa 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. 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.