VacationSelector

Cardiff or Montreal?

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

Cardiff
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Montreal
47
match

Wins on good for families and places to eat 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.

CardiffMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Cardiff leads by 46 points.46
CardiffMontreal
Score460
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km87
Coast distance2 km276 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 14 points.14
CardiffMontreal
Score6074
Restaurants within 2 km of centre5411,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3249
Museums & heritage. Cardiff leads by 2 points.2
CardiffMontreal
Score3937
Museums within 10 km6139
Museums within 2 km of centre619
Share of museums within 2 km %1049
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 14 points.14
CardiffMontreal
Score4862
Drinking venues within 4 km5361,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre395493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7449
Nightclubs within 4 km3574
Nature & day trips. Cardiff leads by 14 points.14
CardiffMontreal
Score5036
Protected land share 50 km %182
Landscape blanket share 50 km %150
Land share of disc %68100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 18 points.18
CardiffMontreal
Score3250
Tourist attractions within 2 km411
Park area within 2 km88 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 11 points.11
CardiffMontreal
Score4556
Notable places within 2 km5198
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cardiff and Montreal are level on 54.
CardiffMontreal
Score5454
Price level global84.984
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cardiff leads by 4 points.4
CardiffMontreal
Score5450
Monthly daytime high7.7 °C to 20.2 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall49 mm to 87 mm69 mm to 121 mm
Dry months00
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
Cardiff
8
8
10
13
16
18
20
20
18
14
11
9
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Cardiff
8
7
8
9
12
15
17
18
17
15
12
9
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Cardiff
77
55
49
54
56
56
61
66
54
87
83
79
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Cardiff
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cardiff
2
3
4
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cardiff: 1991-2020 normals, Cardiff-Wales Airport (14.9 km from centre). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCardiffMontreal
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 10 m
no fares
CWL · 15 km
1 h 15 m
€133-276
YUL · 16 km
Punta CanaPUJ
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 50 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
CancunCUN
9 h 55 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
4 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
GenevaGVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 20 m
no fares
BRS · 34 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
New DelhiDEL
8 h 40 m
no fares
BHX · 146 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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

MeasureCardiffMontreal
Official languageEnglishFrench, English
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation41 m31 m
Main airportCardiff International Airport (CWL)15 km from centre8 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureCardiffMontreal
City population383,5361,895,211
People per km²2,7343,806
Museums within 10 km937
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre5597
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cardiff or Montreal 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). 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. 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.