VacationSelector

Cancun or Inverness?

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

Your match

Cancun
✓ Best match
50
match

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

Inverness
25
match

Wins on 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.

CancunInverness
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 69 points.69
CancunInverness
Score9728
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km231
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunInverness
Score5421
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681114
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1811
Museums & heritage. Cancun and Inverness are level on 20.
CancunInverness
Score2020
Museums within 10 km16
Museums within 2 km of centre15
Share of museums within 2 km %10083
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 21 points.21
CancunInverness
Score3615
Drinking venues within 4 km270113
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre17598
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6587
Nightclubs within 4 km334
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 45 points.45
CancunInverness
Score549
Protected land share 50 km %912
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %4588
Park area within 2 km66 hectares3 hectares
Good for families. Cancun leads by 32 points.32
CancunInverness
Score320
Tourist attractions within 2 km23
Park area within 2 km66 hectares3 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Inverness leads by 20 points.20
CancunInverness
Score424
Notable places within 2 km516
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunInverness
Score7654
Price level global54.284.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 29 points.29
CancunInverness
Score8152
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C6.6 °C to 18.9 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm40 mm to 72 mm
Dry months11
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
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1

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. Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunInverness
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
BirminghamBHX
9 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
BelfastBFS, BHD
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
INV · 12 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

MeasureCancunInverness
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaEnglish
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation5 m7 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunInverness
City population888,79747,380
People per km²–2,289
Museums within 10 km13
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3115
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 Inverness 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. 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.