VacationSelector

Cancun or Jakarta?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Jakarta
✓ Best match
54
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.

CancunJakarta
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 36 points.36
CancunJakarta
Score9761
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km235
Coast distance3 km8 km
Water distance3 km8 km
Places to eat. Jakarta leads by 2 points.2
CancunJakarta
Score5456
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681908
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1816
Museums & heritage. Jakarta leads by 8 points.8
CancunJakarta
Score2028
Museums within 10 km126
Museums within 2 km of centre110
Share of museums within 2 km %10038
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Jakarta leads by 21 points.21
CancunJakarta
Score3657
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,046
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175372
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6536
Nightclubs within 4 km3310
Nature & day trips. Cancun and Jakarta are level on 54.
CancunJakarta
Score5454
Protected land share 50 km %9
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4572
Park area within 2 km66 hectares56 hectares
Good for families. Jakarta leads by 1 points.1
CancunJakarta
Score3233
Tourist attractions within 2 km22
Park area within 2 km66 hectares56 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km35
Sights concentration. Jakarta leads by 43 points.43
CancunJakarta
Score447
Notable places within 2 km558
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Jakarta leads by 17 points.17
CancunJakarta
Score7693
Price level global54.229.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 20 points.20
CancunJakarta
Score8161
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C30.5 °C to 33.3 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm39 mm to 360 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
Jakarta
31
31
32
33
33
32
32
33
33
33
33
32
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Jakarta
29
29
29
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
30
29
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Jakarta
355
360
197
160
102
70
85
39
56
99
128
210
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Jakarta
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Jakarta
3
3
4
5
5
4
5
6
6
6
4
3

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. Jakarta: 1991-2020 normals, Jakarta / Observatory (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunJakarta
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
14 h 0 m
€508-593
1 stop
CGK · 20 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

MeasureCancunJakarta
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaIndonesian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Rupiah (IDR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+7
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m91 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsSoekarno-Hatta International Airport (CGK)20 km from centre90 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunJakarta
City population888,79711,135,191
People per km²16,821
Museums within 10 km144
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3135
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

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