VacationSelector

Cancun or Santiago?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Santiago
✓ Best match
55
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.

CancunSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 97 points.97
CancunSantiago
Score970
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km89 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 18 points.18
CancunSantiago
Score5472
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6811,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1832
Museums & heritage. Santiago leads by 25 points.25
CancunSantiago
Score2045
Museums within 10 km187
Museums within 2 km of centre130
Share of museums within 2 km %10034
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Santiago leads by 25 points.25
CancunSantiago
Score3661
Drinking venues within 4 km270912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6559
Nightclubs within 4 km33112
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 2 points.2
CancunSantiago
Score5452
Protected land share 50 km %917
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Santiago leads by 17 points.17
CancunSantiago
Score3249
Tourist attractions within 2 km212
Park area within 2 km66 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km33
Sights concentration. Santiago leads by 44 points.44
CancunSantiago
Score448
Notable places within 2 km562
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 5 points.5
CancunSantiago
Score7681
Price level global54.246.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 4 points.4
CancunSantiago
Score8185
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm0 mm to 87 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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

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. Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunSantiago
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
BogotaBOG
3 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
5 h 40 m
€340-367
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
1 h 40 m
€327-383
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
LimaLIM
5 h 10 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 35 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 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

MeasureCancunSantiago
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaSpanish
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number911Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation5 m575 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunSantiago
City population888,7976,257,516
People per km²7,468
Museums within 10 km154
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3164
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 Santiago 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.