VacationSelector

Cancun or Los Angeles?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Los Angeles
✓ Best match
53
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.

CancunLos Angeles
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 68 points.68
CancunLos Angeles
Score9729
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km
Water distance3 km
Beaches 25 km11
Warmest sea temp20.2 °C
Scoring variantbeachScoreWideRing
Declared2026-08-25
Registerseed/editorial-overrides.json
Places to eat. Los Angeles leads by 12 points.12
CancunLos Angeles
Score5466
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,337
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1822
Museums & heritage. Los Angeles leads by 29 points.29
CancunLos Angeles
Score2049
Museums within 10 km169
Museums within 2 km of centre123
Share of museums within 2 km %10033
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Los Angeles leads by 18 points.18
CancunLos Angeles
Score3654
Drinking venues within 4 km270660
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175432
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6565
Nightclubs within 4 km3364
Nature & day trips. Los Angeles leads by 8 points.8
CancunLos Angeles
Score5462
Protected land share 50 km %926
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4580
Park area within 2 km66 hectares20 hectares
Good for families. Los Angeles leads by 1 points.1
CancunLos Angeles
Score3233
Tourist attractions within 2 km211
Park area within 2 km66 hectares20 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Los Angeles leads by 50 points.50
CancunLos Angeles
Score454
Notable places within 2 km588
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunLos Angeles
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Los Angeles leads by 6 points.6
CancunLos Angeles
Score8187
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C18.6 °C to 24.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 76 mm
Dry months18
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
Los Angeles
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
24
22
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Los Angeles
15
15
15
15
17
18
20
20
20
19
17
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Los Angeles
73
76
44
16
7
2
1
0
3
13
21
57
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Los Angeles
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
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. Los Angeles: 1991-2020 normals, Los Angeles Airport (18.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunLos Angeles
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
€261-303
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
DenverDEN, APA
3 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
2 h 45 m
€166-318
1 stop
LAX · 19 km
Las VegasLAS
4 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
4 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
LAX · 19 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 25 m
€600-640
1 stop
LAX · 19 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

MeasureCancunLos Angeles
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 m106 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsLos Angeles International Airport (LAX)19 km from centre180 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunLos Angeles
City population888,7973,898,747
People per km²2,994
Museums within 10 km138
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3146
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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