VacationSelector

Cancun or Lyon?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Lyon
52
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.

CancunLyon
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunLyon
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2326
Coast distance3 km253 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 25 points.25
CancunLyon
Score5479
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1840
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 35 points.35
CancunLyon
Score2055
Museums within 10 km153
Museums within 2 km of centre125
Share of museums within 2 km %10047
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 22 points.22
CancunLyon
Score3658
Drinking venues within 4 km270866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6571
Nightclubs within 4 km3347
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 21 points.21
CancunLyon
Score5433
Protected land share 50 km %96
Landscape blanket share 50 km %06
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 27 points.27
CancunLyon
Score3259
Tourist attractions within 2 km225
Park area within 2 km66 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 50 points.50
CancunLyon
Score454
Notable places within 2 km586
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
CancunLyon
Score7662
Price level global54.273.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 17 points.17
CancunLyon
Score8164
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm43 mm to 101 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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

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. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunLyon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 35 m
€446-565
1 stop
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 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 2026-08 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

MeasureCancunLyon
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaFrench
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m160 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunLyon
City population888,797519,127
People per km²10,838
Museums within 10 km142
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre31148
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 Lyon 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.