VacationSelector

Cancun or Plovdiv?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Plovdiv
44
match

Wins on sights concentration and value for money 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.

CancunPlovdiv
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunPlovdiv
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km231
Coast distance3 km130 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 8 points.8
CancunPlovdiv
Score5446
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681369
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1819
Museums & heritage. Plovdiv leads by 18 points.18
CancunPlovdiv
Score2038
Museums within 10 km126
Museums within 2 km of centre126
Share of museums within 2 km %100100
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Plovdiv leads by 6 points.6
CancunPlovdiv
Score3642
Drinking venues within 4 km270392
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175285
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6573
Nightclubs within 4 km3326
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 17 points.17
CancunPlovdiv
Score5437
Protected land share 50 km %95
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares125 hectares
Good for families. Cancun leads by 1 points.1
CancunPlovdiv
Score3231
Tourist attractions within 2 km25
Park area within 2 km66 hectares125 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Plovdiv leads by 37 points.37
CancunPlovdiv
Score441
Notable places within 2 km541
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Plovdiv leads by 23 points.23
CancunPlovdiv
Score7699
Price level global54.221.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 16 points.16
CancunPlovdiv
Score8165
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C5.4 °C to 31.1 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm25 mm to 81 mm
Dry months12
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
Plovdiv
5
9
14
19
24
28
31
31
26
19
13
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Plovdiv
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Plovdiv
65
63
61
53
67
62
40
25
48
66
59
81
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Plovdiv
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Plovdiv
3
4
5
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

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. Plovdiv: 1997-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Plovdiv (1.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunPlovdiv
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 125 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 125 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
SOF · 125 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
RomeFCO, CIA
11 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 125 km
BarcelonaBCN
10 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 125 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
SOF · 125 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
SOF · 125 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

MeasureCancunPlovdiv
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaBulgarian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m172 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsPlovdiv International Airport (PDV)12 km from centre8 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunPlovdiv
City population888,797333,994
People per km²3,274
Museums within 10 km118
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3136
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 Plovdiv 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.