VacationSelector

Cancun or Cape Town?

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

Your match

Cancun
50
match

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

Cape Town
✓ Best match
57
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.

CancunCape Town
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 37 points.37
CancunCape Town
Score9760
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2329
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cape Town leads by 13 points.13
CancunCape Town
Score5467
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681650
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1842
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 34 points.34
CancunCape Town
Score2054
Museums within 10 km125
Museums within 2 km of centre120
Share of museums within 2 km %10080
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Cape Town leads by 11 points.11
CancunCape Town
Score3647
Drinking venues within 4 km270483
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175389
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6581
Nightclubs within 4 km3347
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
CancunCape Town
Score5436
Protected land share 50 km %96
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4542
Park area within 2 km66 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Cape Town leads by 4 points.4
CancunCape Town
Score3236
Tourist attractions within 2 km219
Park area within 2 km66 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Cape Town leads by 41 points.41
CancunCape Town
Score445
Notable places within 2 km551
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 9 points.9
CancunCape Town
Score7685
Price level global54.240.5
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 5 points.5
CancunCape Town
Score8186
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C18 °C to 27.5 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm10 mm to 97 mm
Dry months16
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
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11

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. Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunCape Town
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
2 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
3 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 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

MeasureCancunCape Town
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Rand (ZAR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCMN230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+2
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m5 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunCape Town
City population888,7973,776,313
People per km²–1,538
Museums within 10 km122
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre3165
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cancun or Cape Town 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. 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.