VacationSelector

Cancun or Paphos?

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

Paphos
46
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.

CancunPaphos
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
CancunPaphos
Score9779
Swim season months126
Beaches 10 km2327
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 10 points.10
CancunPaphos
Score5444
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681251
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1822
Museums & heritage. Paphos leads by 2 points.2
CancunPaphos
Score2022
Museums within 10 km18
Museums within 2 km of centre13
Share of museums within 2 km %10038
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunPaphos
Score3630
Drinking venues within 4 km270224
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175161
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6572
Nightclubs within 4 km3311
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 31 points.31
CancunPaphos
Score5423
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4533
Park area within 2 km66 hectares27 hectares
Good for families. Paphos leads by 10 points.10
CancunPaphos
Score3242
Tourist attractions within 2 km230
Park area within 2 km66 hectares27 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Paphos leads by 15 points.15
CancunPaphos
Score419
Notable places within 2 km512
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunPaphos
Score7670
Price level global54.261.4
Daily budget€129
Year-round weather. Paphos leads by 5 points.5
CancunPaphos
Score8186
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C17 °C to 30.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 98 mm
Dry months18
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
Paphos
17
17
19
21
25
28
30
31
29
27
23
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Paphos
17
17
17
18
21
24
27
28
27
25
22
19
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Paphos
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Paphos
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10

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. Paphos: 1991-2020 normals, Paphos Airport (8.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunPaphos
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 8 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
BirminghamBHX
9 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 5 m
€253-340
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 5 m
€197-331
1 stop
PFO · 8 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
5 h 0 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
NewcastleNCL
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
11 h 40 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 10 m
€123-135
PFO · 8 km
KatowiceKTW
11 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
PFO · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
LCA · 110 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 2026-09 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

MeasureCancunPaphos
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaTurkish, Greek, Modern Greek
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m72 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsPaphos International Airport (PFO)8 km from centre57 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days17 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunPaphos
City population888,79735,961
People per km²1,987
Museums within 10 km14
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3136
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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