VacationSelector

Cancun or West Palm Beach?

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 value for money and places to eat with your weighting.

West Palm Beach
42
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.

CancunWest Palm Beach
Beaches & swimming. Cancun leads by 9 points.9
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score9788
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km2310
Coast distance3 km0 km
Water distance3 km0 km
Places to eat. Cancun leads by 17 points.17
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score5437
Restaurants within 2 km of centre681262
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1814
Museums & heritage. Cancun leads by 3 points.3
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score2017
Museums within 10 km15
Museums within 2 km of centre13
Share of museums within 2 km %10060
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Cancun leads by 16 points.16
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score3620
Drinking venues within 4 km270132
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre17590
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6568
Nightclubs within 4 km3310
Nature & day trips. West Palm Beach leads by 15 points.15
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score5469
Protected land share 50 km %915
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4545
Park area within 2 km66 hectares34 hectares
Good for families. Cancun leads by 11 points.11
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score3221
Tourist attractions within 2 km23
Park area within 2 km66 hectares34 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. West Palm Beach leads by 8 points.8
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score412
Notable places within 2 km58
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cancun leads by 33 points.33
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score7643
Price level global54.2100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cancun leads by 6 points.6
CancunWest Palm Beach
Score8175
Monthly daytime high26.2 °C to 30.3 °C24 °C to 32.5 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 224 mm67 mm to 217 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
West Palm Beach
24
25
26
28
30
32
32
33
31
30
27
25
Sea temperature, °C
Cancun
27
26
26
27
28
28
29
29
29
29
28
27
West Palm Beach
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Rainfall, mm
Cancun
63
50
38
41
92
181
89
114
166
224
124
68
West Palm Beach
86
67
84
92
126
214
145
217
199
147
88
78
Daylight, hours per day
Cancun
11
11
12
13
13
13
13
13
12
12
11
11
West Palm Beach
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
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. West Palm Beach: 1991-2020 normals, Palm Beach International (5.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCancunWest Palm Beach
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
3 h 35 m
€328-337
CUN · 14 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
3 h 45 m
€321-392
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 25 m
€313-363
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MadridMAD
10 h 0 m
€721-977
CUN · 14 km
9 h 0 m
€522-631
1 stop
MIA · 105 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
2 h 10 m
€110-128
CUN · 14 km
3 h 5 m
€278-290
MIA · 105 km
CincinnatiCVG, LUK
3 h 0 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
PhiladelphiaPHL, TTN
3 h 25 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
BostonBOS, PSM
3 h 55 m
€345-392
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
4 h 10 m
€361-445
1 stop
CUN · 14 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
RaleighRDU
2 h 50 m
no fares
CUN · 14 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 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

MeasureCancunWest Palm Beach
Official languageSpanish, Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya
CurrencyMexican Peso (MXN)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB127 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation5 m6 m
Main airportCancún International Airport (CUN)14 km from centre136 non-stop destinationsPresident Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT)6 km from centre37 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCancunWest Palm Beach
City population888,797117,415
People per km²786
Museums within 10 km14
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3118
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

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