VacationSelector

Cancun or Tirana?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Cancun
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Tirana
51
match

Wins on sights concentration and nightlife 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.

CancunTirana
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 80 points.80
CancunTirana
Score9717
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km230
Coast distance3 km26 km
Water distance3 km26 km
Places to eat. Tirana leads by 1 points.1
CancunTirana
Score5455
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681572
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1822
Museums & heritage. Tirana leads by 5 points.5
CancunTirana
Score2025
Museums within 10 km112
Museums within 2 km of centre18
Share of museums within 2 km %10067
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Tirana leads by 22 points.22
CancunTirana
Score3658
Drinking venues within 4 km270945
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175683
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6572
Nightclubs within 4 km3329
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 5 points.5
CancunTirana
Score5449
Protected land share 50 km %911
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %4583
Park area within 2 km66 hectares147 hectares
Good for families. Tirana leads by 20 points.20
CancunTirana
Score3252
Tourist attractions within 2 km221
Park area within 2 km66 hectares147 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km30
Sights concentration. Tirana leads by 49 points.49
CancunTirana
Score453
Notable places within 2 km583
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Tirana leads by 8 points.8
CancunTirana
Score7684
Price level global54.242.6
Daily budget€76
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 14 points.14
CancunTirana
Score8167
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C11.6 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm43 mm to 172 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
Tirana
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
31
27
22
17
13
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Tirana
15
14
14
16
19
23
24
25
24
21
19
16
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Tirana
143
117
116
103
84
66
43
55
78
114
172
148
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Tirana
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cancun
No sunshine record
Tirana
4
4
5
6
9
10
12
11
9
7
4
3

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. Tirana: 1961-1990 normals, Tirana (3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunTirana
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
TIA · 13 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
10 h 20 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 30 m
€73-102
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
€62-138
TIA · 13 km
KatowiceKTW
11 h 35 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
€73-87
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
11 h 40 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 5 m
€68-80
TIA · 13 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 50 m
€33-74
TIA · 13 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 45 m
€657-706
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€94-143
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
AmsterdamAMS
10 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
€169-220
1 stop
TIA · 13 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
12 h 55 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 35 m
€100-109
TIA · 13 km
StockholmARN, BMA, NYO, VST
11 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
3 h 5 m
€66-111
TIA · 13 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

MeasureCancunTirana
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaAlbanian
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Lek (ALL)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation5 m110 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsTirana International Airport Mother Teresa (TIA)13 km from centre129 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunTirana
City population888,797389,323
People per km²9,314
Museums within 10 km111
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3146
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

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