VacationSelector

Cancun or Montpellier?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Montpellier
47
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

CancunMontpellier
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 65 points.65
CancunMontpellier
Score9732
Swim season months122
Beaches 10 km238
Coast distance3 km9 km
Water distance3 km9 km
Places to eat. Montpellier leads by 11 points.11
CancunMontpellier
Score5465
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681737
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1834
Museums & heritage. Montpellier leads by 6 points.6
CancunMontpellier
Score2026
Museums within 10 km114
Museums within 2 km of centre13
Share of museums within 2 km %10021
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Montpellier leads by 2 points.2
CancunMontpellier
Score3638
Drinking venues within 4 km270318
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6583
Nightclubs within 4 km3325
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
CancunMontpellier
Score5443
Protected land share 50 km %915
Landscape blanket share 50 km %010
Land share of disc %4570
Park area within 2 km66 hectares55 hectares
Good for families. Montpellier leads by 12 points.12
CancunMontpellier
Score3244
Tourist attractions within 2 km28
Park area within 2 km66 hectares55 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km37
Sights concentration. Montpellier leads by 34 points.34
CancunMontpellier
Score438
Notable places within 2 km535
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
CancunMontpellier
Score7662
Price level global54.273.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 7 points.7
CancunMontpellier
Score8174
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C12 °C to 29.6 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm17 mm to 93 mm
Dry months15
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
Montpellier
12
13
16
19
23
27
30
29
25
21
16
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Montpellier
12
12
12
14
16
19
21
22
20
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Montpellier
56
35
39
56
46
33
17
36
88
93
78
59
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Montpellier
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Montpellier
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
10
8
6
5
5

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. Montpellier: 1991-2020 normals, Montpellier (7.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMontpellier
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€136-184
1 stop
MRS · 109 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
QuebecYQB
4 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
7 h 30 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
FNI · 46 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
BZR · 53 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

MeasureCancunMontpellier
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 m7 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMontpellier-Méditerranée Airport (MPL)8 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMontpellier
City population888,797310,240
People per km²5,452
Museums within 10 km114
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3165
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months2 months

Where else could you go?

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