VacationSelector

Cancun or Toronto?

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.

Toronto
✓ Best match
54
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.

CancunToronto
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 54 points.54
CancunToronto
Score9743
Swim season months121
Beaches 10 km2358
Coast distance3 km533 km
Water distance3 km5 km
Places to eat. Toronto leads by 28 points.28
CancunToronto
Score5482
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6812,133
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1839
Museums & heritage. Toronto leads by 23 points.23
CancunToronto
Score2043
Museums within 10 km135
Museums within 2 km of centre125
Share of museums within 2 km %10071
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Toronto leads by 33 points.33
CancunToronto
Score3669
Drinking venues within 4 km2701,500
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre175966
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6564
Nightclubs within 4 km33103
Nature & day trips. Cancun leads by 28 points.28
CancunToronto
Score5426
Protected land share 50 km %92
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %45100
Park area within 2 km66 hectares68 hectares
Good for families. Toronto leads by 25 points.25
CancunToronto
Score3257
Tourist attractions within 2 km223
Park area within 2 km66 hectares68 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Toronto leads by 57 points.57
CancunToronto
Score461
Notable places within 2 km5128
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 22 points.22
CancunToronto
Score7654
Price level global54.284
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 26 points.26
CancunToronto
Score8155
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C-0.2 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm51 mm to 85 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
Toronto
0
0
5
12
19
24
27
26
22
15
8
2
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
Toronto
4
3
3
4
7
15
20
21
19
13
8
5
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
Toronto
62
58
51
74
58
85
83
69
62
75
65
66
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
Toronto
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9

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. Toronto: 1991-2020 normals, Toronto City (1.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunToronto
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
1 h 20 m
€244-359
YYZ · 20 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
4 h 30 m
no fares
YYZ · 20 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 15 m
€143-160
YYZ · 20 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€185-501
YYZ · 20 km
OttawaYOW, YND
4 h 5 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YYZ · 20 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
1 h 50 m
€216-378
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
YYZ · 20 km
HalifaxYHZ
4 h 40 m
€361-378
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 10 m
€158-362
YYZ · 20 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
7 h 25 m
€443-479
1 stop
YYZ · 20 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
1 h 30 m
€294-299
YYZ · 20 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
1 h 40 m
€327-383
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 0 m
no fares
YYZ · 20 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

MeasureCancunToronto
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec MayaFrench, English
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m76 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsToronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ)20 km from centre189 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunToronto
City population888,7972,794,356
People per km²4,434
Museums within 10 km132
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre31102
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 Toronto 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.