VacationSelector

Cancun or Rotterdam?

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.

Rotterdam
✓ Best match
54
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.

CancunRotterdam
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 60 points.60
CancunRotterdam
Score9737
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km2322
Coast distance3 km24 km
Water distance3 km24 km
Places to eat. Rotterdam leads by 18 points.18
CancunRotterdam
Score5472
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681862
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1846
Museums & heritage. Rotterdam leads by 40 points.40
CancunRotterdam
Score2060
Museums within 10 km141
Museums within 2 km of centre120
Share of museums within 2 km %10049
Unesco sites within 50 km05
Nightlife. Rotterdam leads by 13 points.13
CancunRotterdam
Score3649
Drinking venues within 4 km270542
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175378
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6570
Nightclubs within 4 km3340
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 12 points.12
CancunRotterdam
Score5442
Protected land share 50 km %910
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4579
Park area within 2 km66 hectares61 hectares
Good for families. Rotterdam leads by 30 points.30
CancunRotterdam
Score3262
Tourist attractions within 2 km227
Park area within 2 km66 hectares61 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km38
Sights concentration. Rotterdam leads by 47 points.47
CancunRotterdam
Score451
Notable places within 2 km574
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 18 points.18
CancunRotterdam
Score7658
Price level global54.279.2
Daily budget€181
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 25 points.25
CancunRotterdam
Score8156
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C6.2 °C to 22.1 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm42 mm to 85 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
Rotterdam
6
7
10
14
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Rotterdam
6
5
6
9
12
15
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Rotterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Rotterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Rotterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
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. Rotterdam: 1993-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Rotterdam Airport Zestienhoven (3.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunRotterdam
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
2 h 25 m
€160-183
AMS · 47 km
DublinDUB
9 h 30 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€69-96
AMS · 47 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 47 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
€178-300
AMS · 47 km
ManchesterMAN
9 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€145-187
AMS · 47 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 0 m
€156-208
AMS · 47 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
7 h 45 m
€458-478
1 stop
AMS · 47 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
AMS · 47 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
AMS · 47 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
€159-284
RTM · 5 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

MeasureCancunRotterdam
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaDutch
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 911
Elevation5 m10 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsRotterdam The Hague Airport (RTM)5 km from centre45 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunRotterdam
City population888,797664,311
People per km²2,080
Museums within 10 km140
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km05
Distinct cuisines in the centre3177
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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