VacationSelector

Cancun or Marrakech?

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, level with your weighting

Cancun
50
match

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

Marrakech
50
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.

CancunMarrakech
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunMarrakech
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km134 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Cancun and Marrakech are level on 54.
CancunMarrakech
Score5454
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681461
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1826
Museums & heritage. Marrakech leads by 24 points.24
CancunMarrakech
Score2044
Museums within 10 km122
Museums within 2 km of centre117
Share of museums within 2 km %10077
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Marrakech leads by 1 points.1
CancunMarrakech
Score3637
Drinking venues within 4 km270282
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175161
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6557
Nightclubs within 4 km3332
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 2 points.2
CancunMarrakech
Score5452
Protected land share 50 km %9
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares47 hectares
Good for families. Marrakech leads by 21 points.21
CancunMarrakech
Score3253
Tourist attractions within 2 km228
Park area within 2 km66 hectares47 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Marrakech leads by 42 points.42
CancunMarrakech
Score446
Notable places within 2 km555
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Marrakech leads by 10 points.10
CancunMarrakech
Score7686
Price level global54.239.8
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun and Marrakech are level on 81.
CancunMarrakech
Score8181
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C19.1 °C to 37.6 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm1 mm to 36 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
Marrakech
19
21
24
26
30
34
38
37
33
29
23
20
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Marrakech
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Marrakech
26
27
36
28
9
3
1
3
14
19
29
25
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Marrakech
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Marrakech
8
8
8
9
10
11
11
10
9
8
8
7

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. Marrakech: 1991-2020 normals, Marrakech (5.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMarrakech
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 20 m
€140-172
RAK · 6 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 10 m
€85-123
RAK · 6 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€64-110
RAK · 6 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€64-110
RAK · 6 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 25 m
€549-632
1 stop
RAK · 6 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 10 m
€61-121
RAK · 6 km
BirminghamBHX
9 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
RAK · 6 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
€124-167
1 stop
RAK · 6 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
€144-224
1 stop
RAK · 6 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
RAK · 6 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

MeasureCancunMarrakech
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaArabic, Standard Moroccan Tamazight
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Moroccan Dirham (MAD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCE50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1
Emergency number911Police 19/112, ambulance 15, fire 15
Elevation5 m465 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMarrakesh Menara Airport (RAK)6 km from centre118 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMarrakech
City population888,7971,002,697
People per km²4,360
Museums within 10 km114
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3156
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 Marrakech 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.