VacationSelector

Cancun or Catania?

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, 2 points apart

Cancun
50
match

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

Catania
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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.

CancunCatania
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 39 points.39
CancunCatania
Score9758
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km235
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunCatania
Score5449
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681637
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1814
Museums & heritage. Catania leads by 39 points.39
CancunCatania
Score2059
Museums within 10 km134
Museums within 2 km of centre127
Share of museums within 2 km %10079
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Catania leads by 11 points.11
CancunCatania
Score3647
Drinking venues within 4 km270537
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175403
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6575
Nightclubs within 4 km3318
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 23 points.23
CancunCatania
Score5431
Protected land share 50 km %910
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4561
Park area within 2 km66 hectares11 hectares
Good for families. Catania leads by 4 points.4
CancunCatania
Score3236
Tourist attractions within 2 km225
Park area within 2 km66 hectares11 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Catania leads by 35 points.35
CancunCatania
Score439
Notable places within 2 km537
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
CancunCatania
Score7668
Price level global54.264.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 4 points.4
CancunCatania
Score8177
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C15.8 °C to 34.5 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm9 mm to 83 mm
Dry months15
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
Catania
16
16
19
21
26
31
34
35
30
26
21
17
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Catania
15
15
15
16
18
22
25
26
25
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Catania
65
45
42
32
18
11
9
9
49
51
71
83
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Catania
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Catania
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
10
7
6
5
4

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. Catania: 1991-2020 normals, Catania / Sigonella (18.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunCatania
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€45-94
CTA · 4 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€38-50
CTA · 4 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 0 m
€106-144
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€91-153
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
VeronaVRN, VBS
11 h 10 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
€72-129
CTA · 4 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€133-162
1 stop
CTA · 4 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
9 h 0 m
no fares
CTA · 4 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
9 h 15 m
no fares
CTA · 4 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
€201-205
CTA · 4 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€101-146
1 stop
CTA · 4 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

MeasureCancunCatania
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaItalian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m7 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsCatania-Fontanarossa Airport (CTA)4 km from centre95 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunCatania
City population888,797311,584
People per km²1,704
Museums within 10 km125
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre3130
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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