VacationSelector

Dubai or Florence?

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, level with your weighting

Dubai
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and places to eat with your weighting.

Florence
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

DubaiFlorence
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 100 points.100
DubaiFlorence
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km520
Coast distance0 km78 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 7 points.7
DubaiFlorence
Score6659
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0861,299
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2615
Museums & heritage. Florence leads by 44 points.44
DubaiFlorence
Score3882
Museums within 10 km26132
Museums within 2 km of centre1893
Share of museums within 2 km %6970
Unesco sites within 50 km04
Nightlife. Florence leads by 3 points.3
DubaiFlorence
Score5356
Drinking venues within 4 km601818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306599
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5173
Nightclubs within 4 km8434
Nature & day trips. Florence leads by 20 points.20
DubaiFlorence
Score1838
Protected land share 50 km %49
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %52100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares86 hectares
Good for families. Florence leads by 3 points.3
DubaiFlorence
Score4952
Tourist attractions within 2 km3730
Park area within 2 km13 hectares86 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Florence leads by 38 points.38
DubaiFlorence
Score3775
Notable places within 2 km33292
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 1 points.1
DubaiFlorence
Score6968
Price level global63.464.9
Daily budget€155
Year-round weather. Florence leads by 2 points.2
DubaiFlorence
Score6668
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C10.8 °C to 32.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm32 mm to 132 mm
Dry months122
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
Dubai
25
26
29
34
38
41
42
42
40
36
31
27
Florence
11
12
16
20
24
29
32
33
27
22
16
11
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Florence
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Florence
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Florence
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Florence
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
5
4
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Dubai: 1991-2020 normals, Dubai International Airport (3.3 km from centre). Florence: 1995-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Firenze / Peretola (5.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiFlorence
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 40 m
€143-159
FLR · 6 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
2 h 5 m
€180-199
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
1 h 55 m
€232-255
2 stops
FLR · 6 km
TiranaTIA
5 h 5 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 70 km
MunichMUC
6 h 0 m
€306-356
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
ZurichZRH
6 h 15 m
€237-344
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 6 km
RomeFCO, CIA
5 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 6 km
BarcelonaBCN
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 35 m
€113-168
FLR · 6 km
BucharestOTP, BBU
4 h 40 m
€263-354
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
2 h 10 m
€104-116
PSA · 70 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
FLR · 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

MeasureDubaiFlorence
Official languageArabicItalian
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCFL230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m50 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsFlorence Airport, Peretola (FLR)6 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiFlorence
City population3,944,751360,930
People per km²3,528
Museums within 10 km14140
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km04
Distinct cuisines in the centre5262
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Florence 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). 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.