VacationSelector

Cancun or Quebec City?

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.

Quebec City
41
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.

CancunQuebec City
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunQuebec City
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km239
Coast distance3 km47 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Quebec City leads by 1 points.1
CancunQuebec City
Score5455
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681387
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1831
Museums & heritage. Quebec City leads by 26 points.26
CancunQuebec City
Score2046
Museums within 10 km126
Museums within 2 km of centre119
Share of museums within 2 km %10073
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunQuebec City
Score3631
Drinking venues within 4 km270250
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175195
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6578
Nightclubs within 4 km338
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
CancunQuebec City
Score5443
Protected land share 50 km %97
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares172 hectares
Good for families. Quebec City leads by 18 points.18
CancunQuebec City
Score3250
Tourist attractions within 2 km212
Park area within 2 km66 hectares172 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Quebec City leads by 39 points.39
CancunQuebec City
Score443
Notable places within 2 km547
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunQuebec City
Score7654
Price level global54.284
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 35 points.35
CancunQuebec City
Score8146
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C-5.7 °C to 25.3 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm79 mm to 123 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
Quebec City
-6
-4
1
9
17
22
25
25
20
12
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Quebec City
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Quebec City
79
87
82
106
89
118
119
103
115
123
96
109
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Quebec City
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
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. Quebec City: 1991-2020 normals, Beauport (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunQuebec City
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
55 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
Punta CanaPUJ
3 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
Puerto VallartaPVR
2 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
5 h 35 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
PhiladelphiaPHL, TTN
3 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
YQB · 13 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
3 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
YQB · 13 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

MeasureCancunQuebec City
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 m98 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsQuebec Jean Lesage International Airport (YQB)13 km from centre31 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunQuebec City
City population888,797574,482
People per km²1,184
Museums within 10 km116
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3147
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 Quebec City 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.