VacationSelector

Cancun or Milan?

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 year-round weather with your weighting.

Milan
✓ Best match
63
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.

CancunMilan
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunMilan
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km234
Coast distance3 km120 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Milan leads by 16 points.16
CancunMilan
Score5470
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,991
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1820
Museums & heritage. Milan leads by 54 points.54
CancunMilan
Score2074
Museums within 10 km187
Museums within 2 km of centre155
Share of museums within 2 km %10063
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Milan leads by 39 points.39
CancunMilan
Score3675
Drinking venues within 4 km2702,215
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175961
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6543
Nightclubs within 4 km3370
Nature & day trips. Milan leads by 11 points.11
CancunMilan
Score5465
Protected land share 50 km %930
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares102 hectares
Good for families. Milan leads by 45 points.45
CancunMilan
Score3277
Tourist attractions within 2 km276
Park area within 2 km66 hectares102 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km35
Sights concentration. Milan leads by 70 points.70
CancunMilan
Score474
Notable places within 2 km5266
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
CancunMilan
Score7668
Price level global54.264.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 17 points.17
CancunMilan
Score8164
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C7 °C to 28.6 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm44 mm to 127 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
Milan
7
10
15
17
23
26
29
28
24
18
11
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Milan
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Milan
54
44
50
78
102
75
57
83
116
113
127
49
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Milan
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Milan
3
4
5
6
7
7
9
8
5
4
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. Milan: 1991-2020 normals, Novara / Cameri (41.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMilan
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
€48-103
MXP · 40 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
8 h 15 m
€542-635
1 stop
MXP · 40 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€46-63
MXP · 40 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
€63-91
MXP · 40 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€34-53
MXP · 40 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€116-135
LIN · 7 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€78-142
MXP · 40 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 40 m
€129-158
LIN · 7 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
9 h 10 m
no fares
MXP · 40 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€67-76
LIN · 7 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

MeasureCancunMilan
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaItalian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m138 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMilan Malpensa International Airport (MXP)40 km from centre203 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMilan
City population888,7971,354,196
People per km²7,453
Museums within 10 km187
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre3179
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 Milan 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.