VacationSelector

Cancun or San Diego?

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 value for money with your weighting.

San Diego
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families and sights concentration 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.

CancunSan Diego
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 34 points.34
CancunSan Diego
Score9763
Swim season months121
Beaches 10 km2342
Coast distance3 km1 km
Water distance3 km1 km
Places to eat. San Diego leads by 9 points.9
CancunSan Diego
Score5463
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681823
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1827
Museums & heritage. San Diego leads by 24 points.24
CancunSan Diego
Score2044
Museums within 10 km159
Museums within 2 km of centre130
Share of museums within 2 km %10051
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. San Diego leads by 14 points.14
CancunSan Diego
Score3650
Drinking venues within 4 km270615
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175408
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6566
Nightclubs within 4 km3331
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 1 points.1
CancunSan Diego
Score5455
Protected land share 50 km %96
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4552
Park area within 2 km66 hectares308 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 43 points.43
CancunSan Diego
Score3275
Tourist attractions within 2 km240
Park area within 2 km66 hectares308 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. San Diego leads by 36 points.36
CancunSan Diego
Score440
Notable places within 2 km540
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunSan Diego
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 7 points.7
CancunSan Diego
Score8188
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C18.6 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 56 mm
Dry months19
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
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
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. San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunSan Diego
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
5 h 15 m
€299-455
1 stop
SAN · 3 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
DenverDEN, APA
3 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 15 m
€64-224
SAN · 3 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€121-158
SAN · 3 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
TIJ · 26 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
5 h 35 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
RaleighRDU
2 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
4 h 50 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
Las VegasLAS
4 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
SAN · 3 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

MeasureCancunSan Diego
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m129 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunSan Diego
City population888,7971,386,932
People per km²1,438
Museums within 10 km126
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3144
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months1 month

Where else could you go?

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