VacationSelector

Cannes or Geneva?

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

Cannes
49
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Geneva
50
match

Wins on good for families and nature & day trips with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Cannes if the trip is built around the sea: 68 beaches nearby, and water warm enough for swimming through high summer, when the weather is also at its driest.

Choose Geneva if you want the city itself to carry the trip, with many more restaurants and a wider range of kitchens, more places to drink, and more parks and attractions near the centre for children.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

CannesGeneva
Beaches & swimming. Cannes leads by 73 points.73
CannesGeneva
Score730
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km6843
Coast distance1 km279 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. Geneva leads by 20 points.20
CannesGeneva
Score5070
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4731,028
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1935
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 16 points.16
CannesGeneva
Score3652
Museums within 10 km3135
Museums within 2 km of centre520
Share of museums within 2 km %1657
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Geneva leads by 22 points.22
CannesGeneva
Score2850
Drinking venues within 4 km188549
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre164427
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8778
Nightclubs within 4 km1960
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 26 points.26
CannesGeneva
Score3359
Protected land share 50 km %1727
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1621
Land share of disc %53100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares182 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 40 points.40
CannesGeneva
Score2565
Tourist attractions within 2 km728
Park area within 2 km13 hectares182 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km32
Sights concentration. Cannes and Geneva are level on 56.
CannesGeneva
Score5656
Notable places within 2 km9599
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cannes leads by 27 points.27
CannesGeneva
Score6235
Price level global73.7110.5
Daily budget€160€248
Year-round weather. Cannes leads by 15 points.15
CannesGeneva
Score7459
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C5.1 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm55 mm to 94 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

Cannes is the one with a coast: 68 beaches nearby against Geneva's 43, and a sea that warms enough for swimming through summer, which Geneva's water never does. France's national daily estimate, €160, also sits well below Switzerland's €248.

Geneva is the better base when swimming is not the point: many times as much park space and many more tourist attractions near the centre, easier going with children, and more protected land around it, 27% against 17% near Cannes, for walking and day trips.

Where they are alike

Both cities pack a similar number of notable places into walking distance of the centre, so in each you can spend a day on foot without arranging transport.

Their museum holdings are comparable in number, and each has 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, though Geneva's sit more tightly around the centre. Summer highs are close, 28°C in Cannes and 27°C in Geneva, so the warm season feels similar even if the rest of the year does not.

Which traveller are you?

A traveller who plans days around the water should take Cannes: 68 beaches within reach and four months when the sea holds 21°C or more, which Geneva's water never reaches.

Families will find more to work with in Geneva, with many times as much park space and many more tourist attractions near the centre, and more protected land around the city when a day out means leaving it.

Anyone travelling to eat and go out should pick Geneva: about twice as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, and far more bars and clubs, nearly all of them close to the centre.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €160 and €248, are national estimates for France and Switzerland, the general price level for restaurants and hotels. They are not measurements of Cannes or Geneva, and a small, heavily visited coastal town or an international city can sit far from its country's average, further than the two averages sit from each other.

Cannes's warmest and driest weeks fall in high summer, in a town of about 74,000 residents, so the beaches that make its case are busiest exactly when the weather is best. Geneva's 43 beaches sit on water with no sea temperature behind it, so swimming there is a different proposition.

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
Cannes
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Sea temperature, °C
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Geneva
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Daylight, hours per day
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cannes
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre). Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cannes peaks in July and August, with highs of 28°C, sea at 24-25°C and rain down to 13-18mm, the driest stretch of its year. The weeks either side stay warm enough to swim, but autumn turns markedly wetter, wetter than anything Geneva sees.

Geneva's warm window is narrower, June to August at 24-27°C, and rain never lets up: those same summer months still bring 77-81mm each. Winter days top out near 5°C, so it is a warm-season city rather than a year-round one.

Getting there

Flying fromCannesGeneva
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
€160-186
GVA · 5 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 25 m
€153-221
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
2 h 25 m
€156-181
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 15 m
€83-135
NCE · 20 km
1 h 25 m
€65-78
GVA · 5 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 40 m
€155-228
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
PortoOPO
2 h 15 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
2 h 10 m
€127-171
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 20 m
€375-433
NCE · 20 km
6 h 25 m
€318-351
1 stop
GVA · 5 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 10 m
€666-799
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 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

MeasureCannesGeneva
Official languageFrenchFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m403 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days9 days

By the numbers

MeasureCannesGeneva
City population74,350209,061
People per km²3,79313,148
Museums within 10 km1635
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre3880
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cannes or Geneva 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). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.