VacationSelector

Cancun or Manchester?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Manchester
47
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.

CancunManchester
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 69 points.69
CancunManchester
Score9728
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2310
Coast distance3 km27 km
Water distance3 km27 km
Places to eat. Manchester leads by 14 points.14
CancunManchester
Score5468
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681853
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1835
Museums & heritage. Manchester leads by 22 points.22
CancunManchester
Score2042
Museums within 10 km123
Museums within 2 km of centre111
Share of museums within 2 km %10048
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Manchester leads by 26 points.26
CancunManchester
Score3662
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,029
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175792
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6577
Nightclubs within 4 km3382
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
CancunManchester
Score5436
Protected land share 50 km %917
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %4599
Park area within 2 km66 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Cancun and Manchester are level on 32.
CancunManchester
Score3232
Tourist attractions within 2 km25
Park area within 2 km66 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Manchester leads by 44 points.44
CancunManchester
Score448
Notable places within 2 km561
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunManchester
Score7654
Price level global54.284.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 27 points.27
CancunManchester
Score8154
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C7.2 °C to 20.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm51 mm to 95 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
Manchester
7
8
10
13
17
19
21
20
18
14
10
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Manchester
7
6
7
9
11
14
16
17
16
14
11
9
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Manchester
67
62
51
61
59
63
60
73
71
95
86
84
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Manchester
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Manchester
2
2
3
5
6
6
6
6
4
3
2
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. Manchester: 1991-2020 normals, Manchester Airport (14.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunManchester
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
OsloOSL, TRF
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
VeronaVRN, VBS
11 h 10 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
MAN · 15 km
BelfastBFS, BHD
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
MAN · 15 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

MeasureCancunManchester
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaEnglish
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation5 m38 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsManchester Airport (MAN)15 km from centre210 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunManchester
City population888,797547,627
People per km²4,737
Museums within 10 km128
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3163
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 Manchester 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.