VacationSelector

Cancun or Seoul?

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.

Seoul
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

CancunSeoul
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 82 points.82
CancunSeoul
Score9715
Swim season months122
Beaches 10 km231
Coast distance3 km28 km
Water distance3 km28 km
Places to eat. Seoul leads by 31 points.31
CancunSeoul
Score5485
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6813,559
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1832
Museums & heritage. Seoul leads by 63 points.63
CancunSeoul
Score2083
Museums within 10 km1203
Museums within 2 km of centre190
Share of museums within 2 km %10044
Unesco sites within 50 km05
Nightlife. Seoul leads by 44 points.44
CancunSeoul
Score3680
Drinking venues within 4 km2703,291
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1751,630
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6550
Nightclubs within 4 km3329
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunSeoul
Score5432
Protected land share 50 km %91
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4595
Park area within 2 km66 hectares126 hectares
Good for families. Seoul leads by 47 points.47
CancunSeoul
Score3279
Tourist attractions within 2 km262
Park area within 2 km66 hectares126 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km38
Sights concentration. Seoul leads by 55 points.55
CancunSeoul
Score459
Notable places within 2 km5118
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 4 points.4
CancunSeoul
Score7672
Price level global54.259.4
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 20 points.20
CancunSeoul
Score8161
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C2 °C to 30 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm18 mm to 422 mm
Dry months14
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
Seoul
2
5
11
18
24
28
29
30
26
20
12
4
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Seoul
6
4
5
8
12
17
21
24
23
20
15
10
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Seoul
18
28
38
70
104
138
422
390
156
49
50
20
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Seoul
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Seoul
5
5
6
7
7
6
4
5
6
7
5
5

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. Seoul: 1991-2020 normals, Seoul (2.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunSeoul
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
14 h 55 m
€1,052-1072
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
13 h 10 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
13 h 45 m
€770-823
ICN · 49 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 5 m
€603-659
1 stop
ICN · 49 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
4 h 40 m
€319-382
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
12 h 0 m
€637-697
ICN · 49 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
5 h 55 m
€287-406
2 stops
CUN · 14 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
ICN · 49 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
10 h 45 m
€646-685
ICN · 49 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 10 m
€687-728
2 stops
ICN · 49 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 15 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
11 h 20 m
€560-734
ICN · 49 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

MeasureCancunSeoul
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaKorean, Korean Sign Language
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Won (KRW)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+9
Emergency number911Police 112, ambulance 119, fire 119
Elevation5 m38 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsIncheon International Airport (ICN)49 km from centre161 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunSeoul
City population888,7979,668,465
People per km²15,973
Museums within 10 km180
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km05
Distinct cuisines in the centre31156
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months2 months

Where else could you go?

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