VacationSelector

Cancun or Paris?

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.

Paris
✓ Best match
67
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.

CancunParis
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunParis
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km232
Coast distance3 km149 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Paris leads by 36 points.36
CancunParis
Score5490
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6814,732
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1833
Museums & heritage. Paris leads by 56 points.56
CancunParis
Score2076
Museums within 10 km1185
Museums within 2 km of centre165
Share of museums within 2 km %10035
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Paris leads by 52 points.52
CancunParis
Score3688
Drinking venues within 4 km2703,796
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1751,694
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6545
Nightclubs within 4 km33201
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunParis
Score5448
Protected land share 50 km %928
Landscape blanket share 50 km %026
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares82 hectares
Good for families. Paris leads by 43 points.43
CancunParis
Score3275
Tourist attractions within 2 km289
Park area within 2 km66 hectares82 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Paris leads by 90 points.90
CancunParis
Score494
Notable places within 2 km5865
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
CancunParis
Score7662
Price level global54.273.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 15 points.15
CancunParis
Score8166
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C7.8 °C to 26 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm38 mm to 75 mm
Dry months11
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
Paris
8
9
13
17
20
24
26
26
22
17
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Paris
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Paris
45
38
41
45
75
51
58
54
51
55
54
62
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Paris
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8

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. Paris: 1991-2020 normals, Paris-Montsouris (4.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunParis
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 30 m
€579-648
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
7 h 45 m
€445-510
1 stop
CDG · 22 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
€63-103
CDG · 22 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
7 h 10 m
€444-536
CDG · 22 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
CDG · 22 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
€107-141
ORY · 14 km
LisbonLIS
9 h 30 m
€740-984
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
€138-242
ORY · 14 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 25 m
€687-789
CDG · 22 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
€188-212
CDG · 22 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
CDG · 22 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

MeasureCancunParis
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 m27 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsCharles de Gaulle International Airport (CDG)22 km from centre277 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunParis
City population888,7972,103,778
People per km²19,960
Museums within 10 km1251
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre31169
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 Paris 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.