VacationSelector

Cancun or Cannes?

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

Cancun
50
match

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

Cannes
49
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

CancunCannes
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 24 points.24
CancunCannes
Score9773
Swim season months124
Beaches 10 km2368
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 4 points.4
CancunCannes
Score5450
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681473
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1819
Museums & heritage. Cannes leads by 16 points.16
CancunCannes
Score2036
Museums within 10 km131
Museums within 2 km of centre15
Share of museums within 2 km %10016
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
CancunCannes
Score3628
Drinking venues within 4 km270188
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175164
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6587
Nightclubs within 4 km3319
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 21 points.21
CancunCannes
Score5433
Protected land share 50 km %917
Landscape blanket share 50 km %016
Land share of disc %4553
Park area within 2 km66 hectares13 hectares
Good for families. Cancun leads by 7 points.7
CancunCannes
Score3225
Tourist attractions within 2 km27
Park area within 2 km66 hectares13 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Cannes leads by 52 points.52
CancunCannes
Score456
Notable places within 2 km595
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
CancunCannes
Score7662
Price level global54.273.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 7 points.7
CancunCannes
Score8174
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C13.3 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm13 mm to 138 mm
Dry months13
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
Cancun
26
27
28
29
30
30
30
30
30
29
27
27
Cannes
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Cannes
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cancun: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunCannes
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
€137-165
NCE · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 20 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€164-246
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€153-221
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€133-138
1 stop
NCE · 20 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

MeasureCancunCannes
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaFrench
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m0 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunCannes
City population888,79774,350
People per km²3,793
Museums within 10 km116
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3138
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months4 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cancun or Cannes 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). 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. 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. Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.