VacationSelector

Cancun or Geneva?

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, level with your weighting

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Geneva
50
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

CancunGeneva
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunGeneva
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2343
Coast distance3 km279 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Geneva leads by 16 points.16
CancunGeneva
Score5470
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,028
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1835
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 32 points.32
CancunGeneva
Score2052
Museums within 10 km135
Museums within 2 km of centre120
Share of museums within 2 km %10057
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Geneva leads by 14 points.14
CancunGeneva
Score3650
Drinking venues within 4 km270549
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175427
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6578
Nightclubs within 4 km3360
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 5 points.5
CancunGeneva
Score5459
Protected land share 50 km %927
Landscape blanket share 50 km %021
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares182 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 33 points.33
CancunGeneva
Score3265
Tourist attractions within 2 km228
Park area within 2 km66 hectares182 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Geneva leads by 52 points.52
CancunGeneva
Score456
Notable places within 2 km599
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 41 points.41
CancunGeneva
Score7635
Price level global54.2110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunGeneva
Score8159
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C5.1 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm55 mm to 94 mm
Dry months10
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
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2

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. Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunGeneva
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
55 m
no fares
GVA · 5 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

MeasureCancunGeneva
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m403 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunGeneva
City population888,797209,061
People per km²13,148
Museums within 10 km135
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3180
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 Cancun or Geneva 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.