VacationSelector

Budapest or Cancun?

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

Your match

Budapest
✓ Best match
60
match

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

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BudapestCancun
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
BudapestCancun
Score097
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km623
Coast distance10,000 km3 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 23 points.23
BudapestCancun
Score7754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,699681
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3518
Museums & heritage. Budapest leads by 44 points.44
BudapestCancun
Score6420
Museums within 10 km1441
Museums within 2 km of centre641
Share of museums within 2 km %44100
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 36 points.36
BudapestCancun
Score7236
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765270
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168175
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6665
Nightclubs within 4 km9733
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
BudapestCancun
Score4054
Protected land share 50 km %89
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10045
Park area within 2 km111 hectares66 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 39 points.39
BudapestCancun
Score7132
Tourist attractions within 2 km752
Park area within 2 km111 hectares66 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 65 points.65
BudapestCancun
Score694
Notable places within 2 km2065
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 4 points.4
BudapestCancun
Score8076
Price level global4854.2
Daily budget€104
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 17 points.17
BudapestCancun
Score6481
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C26.2 °C to 30.3 °C
Monthly rainfall27 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
Budapest
4
7
11
17
22
26
27
28
22
16
9
4
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Sea temperature, °C
Budapest
No coastline within reach
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Cancun
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Budapest: 1991-2020 normals, Budapest Met Center (2.1 km from centre). Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestCancun
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 50 m
€87-214
BUD · 18 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
MadridMAD
3 h 0 m
€84-154
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 40 m
€123-153
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 40 m
€42-56
BUD · 18 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€52-62
BUD · 18 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€93-118
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 35 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBudapestCancun
Official languageHungarianSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyForint (HUF)Mexican Peso (MXN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB127 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5
Emergency number112911
Elevation117 m5 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestCancun
City population1,685,209888,797
People per km²3,209
Museums within 10 km811
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8631
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 Budapest 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). 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.