VacationSelector

Cancun or Montreal?

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.

Montreal
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.

CancunMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunMontreal
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km237
Coast distance3 km276 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 20 points.20
CancunMontreal
Score5474
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1849
Museums & heritage. Montreal leads by 17 points.17
CancunMontreal
Score2037
Museums within 10 km139
Museums within 2 km of centre119
Share of museums within 2 km %10049
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 26 points.26
CancunMontreal
Score3662
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6549
Nightclubs within 4 km3374
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
CancunMontreal
Score5436
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 18 points.18
CancunMontreal
Score3250
Tourist attractions within 2 km211
Park area within 2 km66 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 52 points.52
CancunMontreal
Score456
Notable places within 2 km598
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunMontreal
Score7654
Price level global54.284
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 31 points.31
CancunMontreal
Score8150
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm69 mm to 121 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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

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. Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunMontreal
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€133-276
YUL · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
QuebecYQB
4 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
55 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
5 h 0 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
OttawaYOW, YND
4 h 5 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
50 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
5 h 0 m
€190-216
2 stops
YUL · 16 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

MeasureCancunMontreal
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaFrench, English
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m31 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunMontreal
City population888,7971,895,211
People per km²3,806
Museums within 10 km137
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3197
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 Montreal 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.