VacationSelector

Cancun or Kuala Lumpur?

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.

Kuala Lumpur
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on sights concentration and museums & heritage 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.

CancunKuala Lumpur
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 57 points.57
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score9740
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km38 km
Water distance3 km36 km
Places to eat. Kuala Lumpur leads by 24 points.24
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score5478
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6812,358
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1828
Museums & heritage. Kuala Lumpur leads by 31 points.31
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score2051
Museums within 10 km141
Museums within 2 km of centre126
Share of museums within 2 km %10063
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Kuala Lumpur leads by 31 points.31
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score3667
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,308
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175735
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6556
Nightclubs within 4 km33126
Nature & day trips. Kuala Lumpur leads by 15 points.15
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score5469
Protected land share 50 km %928
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4597
Park area within 2 km66 hectares70 hectares
Good for families. Kuala Lumpur leads by 28 points.28
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score3260
Tourist attractions within 2 km226
Park area within 2 km66 hectares70 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km35
Sights concentration. Kuala Lumpur leads by 47 points.47
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score451
Notable places within 2 km575
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Kuala Lumpur leads by 16 points.16
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score7692
Price level global54.230.6
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 29 points.29
CancunKuala Lumpur
Score8152
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C31.9 °C to 33.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm145 mm to 360 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
Kuala Lumpur
33
33
34
34
34
33
33
33
33
33
32
32
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Kuala Lumpur
29
29
30
30
30
30
30
30
30
30
29
29
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Kuala Lumpur
227
197
270
296
232
145
169
178
215
284
360
281
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Kuala Lumpur
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12

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. Kuala Lumpur: 1991-2020 normals, Sepang/KL International Airport (46.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunKuala Lumpur
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
13 h 10 m
€471-602
KUL · 45 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
KUL · 45 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
KUL · 45 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

MeasureCancunKuala Lumpur
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaMalay
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Malaysian Ringgit (MYR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+8
Emergency number911999
Elevation5 m50 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsKuala Lumpur International Airport (KUL)45 km from centre136 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunKuala Lumpur
City population888,7979,000,280
People per km²36,932
Museums within 10 km125
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3169
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 Kuala Lumpur 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.