VacationSelector

Cancun or Las Vegas?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Las Vegas
45
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.

CancunLas Vegas
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunLas Vegas
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km372 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Las Vegas leads by 8 points.8
CancunLas Vegas
Score5462
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681915
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1824
Museums & heritage. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
CancunLas Vegas
Score2019
Museums within 10 km124
Museums within 2 km of centre14
Share of museums within 2 km %10017
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Las Vegas leads by 22 points.22
CancunLas Vegas
Score3658
Drinking venues within 4 km270793
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175485
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6561
Nightclubs within 4 km3390
Nature & day trips. Las Vegas leads by 9 points.9
CancunLas Vegas
Score5463
Protected land share 50 km %950
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares7 hectares
Good for families. Las Vegas leads by 2 points.2
CancunLas Vegas
Score3234
Tourist attractions within 2 km219
Park area within 2 km66 hectares7 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Las Vegas leads by 47 points.47
CancunLas Vegas
Score451
Notable places within 2 km575
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunLas Vegas
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 9 points.9
CancunLas Vegas
Score8172
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C13.9 °C to 40.3 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm1 mm to 21 mm
Dry months112
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
Las Vegas
15
17
22
26
32
38
40
39
35
27
20
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Las Vegas
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Las Vegas
14
21
11
5
2
1
9
8
8
8
8
11
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Las Vegas
10
11
12
13
14
15
14
14
12
11
10
10

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. Las Vegas: 1991-2020 normals, McCarran International Airport (8.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunLas Vegas
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
€76-164
LAS · 4 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
4 h 20 m
€261-438
1 stop
LAS · 4 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
LAS · 4 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
€171-225
LAS · 4 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
4 h 55 m
€242-269
LAS · 4 km
CincinnatiCVG, LUK
3 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
LAS · 4 km
RaleighRDU
2 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 30 m
€217-294
1 stop
LAS · 4 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 40 m
€154-209
LAS · 4 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
4 h 55 m
no fares
LAS · 4 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
LAS · 4 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

MeasureCancunLas Vegas
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m610 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsHarry Reid International Airport (LAS)4 km from centre159 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunLas Vegas
City population888,797641,903
People per km²1,843
Museums within 10 km121
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3149
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

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