VacationSelector

Cancun or Kyoto?

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.

Kyoto
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage and 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.

CancunKyoto
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 80 points.80
CancunKyoto
Score9717
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km47 km
Water distance3 km47 km
Places to eat. Kyoto leads by 30 points.30
CancunKyoto
Score5484
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6815,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1822
Museums & heritage. Kyoto leads by 52 points.52
CancunKyoto
Score2072
Museums within 10 km1132
Museums within 2 km of centre151
Share of museums within 2 km %10039
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Kyoto leads by 44 points.44
CancunKyoto
Score3680
Drinking venues within 4 km2703,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1752,363
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6573
Nightclubs within 4 km3326
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 32 points.32
CancunKyoto
Score5422
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. Kyoto leads by 34 points.34
CancunKyoto
Score3266
Tourist attractions within 2 km262
Park area within 2 km66 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Kyoto leads by 48 points.48
CancunKyoto
Score452
Notable places within 2 km579
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunKyoto
Score7670
Price level global54.262.4
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 19 points.19
CancunKyoto
Score8162
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C8.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm40 mm to 232 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
Kyoto
9
9
13
20
24
27
31
32
28
22
17
11
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Kyoto
14
13
13
15
18
21
25
27
26
23
20
17
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Kyoto
47
67
112
150
147
232
225
149
215
108
68
40
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Kyoto
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Kyoto
5
5
6
6
7
5
6
7
5
5
5
5

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. Kyoto: 1971-2000 (sunshine 1991-2020) normals, Kyoto (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunKyoto
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
13 h 10 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
13 h 45 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
12 h 0 m
€859-891
3 stops
KIX · 81 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
ITM · 39 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 30 m
€1,507-1966
2 stops
ITM · 39 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
KIX · 81 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
KIX · 81 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

MeasureCancunKyoto
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaJapanese
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Yen (JPY)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB100 V, 50 and 60 Hz depending on the region
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+9
Emergency number911Police 110, fire 119
Elevation5 m51 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsKansai International Airport (KIX)81 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunKyoto
City population888,7971,463,723
People per km²–1,768
Museums within 10 km176
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre3189
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 Kyoto 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.