VacationSelector

Cancun or Izmir?

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.

Izmir
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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.

CancunIzmir
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 42 points.42
CancunIzmir
Score9755
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km234
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunIzmir
Score5449
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681770
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1812
Museums & heritage. Izmir leads by 23 points.23
CancunIzmir
Score2043
Museums within 10 km147
Museums within 2 km of centre127
Share of museums within 2 km %10057
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Izmir leads by 26 points.26
CancunIzmir
Score3662
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,028
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175695
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6568
Nightclubs within 4 km3370
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 25 points.25
CancunIzmir
Score5429
Protected land share 50 km %94
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4584
Park area within 2 km66 hectares62 hectares
Good for families. Izmir leads by 3 points.3
CancunIzmir
Score3235
Tourist attractions within 2 km26
Park area within 2 km66 hectares62 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Izmir leads by 36 points.36
CancunIzmir
Score440
Notable places within 2 km539
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Izmir leads by 13 points.13
CancunIzmir
Score7689
Price level global54.235.2
Daily budget€100
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 9 points.9
CancunIzmir
Score8172
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C13 °C to 33.9 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm1 mm to 127 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
Izmir
13
14
17
21
27
31
34
34
29
24
19
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Izmir
16
16
16
17
19
22
23
24
23
21
19
17
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Izmir
119
107
77
51
33
13
1
4
22
55
96
127
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Izmir
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Izmir
5
5
7
8
10
11
13
12
10
8
6
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. Izmir: 1991-2020 normals, Izmir (3.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunIzmir
IstanbulIST, SAW
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
€46-55
ADB · 13 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 0 m
€204-238
1 stop
ADB · 13 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 45 m
€119-184
ADB · 13 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 25 m
€221-272
1 stop
ADB · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
ADB · 13 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 15 m
€231-257
1 stop
ADB · 13 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
ADB · 13 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
ADB · 13 km
ZurichZRH
10 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
€161-180
1 stop
ADB · 13 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
ADB · 13 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 2026-09 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

MeasureCancunIzmir
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaTurkish
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Turkish Lira (TRY)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+3
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m2 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsAdnan Menderes International Airport (ADB)13 km from centre120 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunIzmir
City population888,7974,493,242
People per km²4,760
Museums within 10 km129
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3120
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 Izmir 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.