VacationSelector

Cancun or Ottawa?

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.

Ottawa
43
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.

CancunOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunOttawa
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km239
Coast distance3 km423 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Ottawa leads by 10 points.10
CancunOttawa
Score5464
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1834
Museums & heritage. Ottawa leads by 12 points.12
CancunOttawa
Score2032
Museums within 10 km115
Museums within 2 km of centre18
Share of museums within 2 km %10053
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Ottawa leads by 8 points.8
CancunOttawa
Score3644
Drinking venues within 4 km270432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6570
Nightclubs within 4 km3335
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 13 points.13
CancunOttawa
Score5441
Protected land share 50 km %98
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Ottawa leads by 14 points.14
CancunOttawa
Score3246
Tourist attractions within 2 km211
Park area within 2 km66 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Ottawa leads by 46 points.46
CancunOttawa
Score450
Notable places within 2 km571
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunOttawa
Score7654
Price level global54.284
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 28 points.28
CancunOttawa
Score8153
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm53 mm to 94 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
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9

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. Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
4 h 50 m
€175-263
2 stops
YOW · 12 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
1 h 50 m
€216-378
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
Punta CanaPUJ
3 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
CalgaryYYC
5 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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

MeasureCancunOttawa
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 m70 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunOttawa
City population888,7971,017,449
People per km²366
Museums within 10 km120
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3162
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 Ottawa 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.