VacationSelector

Cancun or San Jose?

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 value for money with your weighting.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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 Jose
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 89 points.89
CancunSan Jose
Score978
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km231
Coast distance3 km14 km
Water distance3 km14 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 13 points.13
CancunSan Jose
Score5441
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1816
Museums & heritage. San Jose leads by 6 points.6
CancunSan Jose
Score2026
Museums within 10 km120
Museums within 2 km of centre19
Share of museums within 2 km %10045
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunSan Jose
Score3631
Drinking venues within 4 km270231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre17588
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6538
Nightclubs within 4 km3316
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 16 points.16
CancunSan Jose
Score5470
Protected land share 50 km %926
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %4591
Park area within 2 km66 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. San Jose leads by 1 points.1
CancunSan Jose
Score3233
Tourist attractions within 2 km22
Park area within 2 km66 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. San Jose leads by 10 points.10
CancunSan Jose
Score414
Notable places within 2 km59
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunSan Jose
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 4 points.4
CancunSan Jose
Score8185
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 78 mm
Dry months18
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 Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
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 Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunSan Jose
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
OAK · 56 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 35 m
€292-400
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
5 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
AustinAUS
2 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 30 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
St LouisSTL, SUS
3 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
SJC · 8 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 Jose
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 m25 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunSan Jose
City population888,7971,013,240
People per km²–2,167
Museums within 10 km119
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3130
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 San Jose 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.