VacationSelector

Dubai or Ghent?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Dubai
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Ghent
50
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

Scoreboard

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

DubaiGhent
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 74 points.74
DubaiGhent
Score10026
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km528
Coast distance0 km32 km
Water distance0 km32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 4 points.4
DubaiGhent
Score6670
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2649
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 20 points.20
DubaiGhent
Score3858
Museums within 10 km2624
Museums within 2 km of centre1820
Share of museums within 2 km %6983
Unesco sites within 50 km05
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 4 points.4
DubaiGhent
Score5349
Drinking venues within 4 km601570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5178
Nightclubs within 4 km8426
Nature & day trips. Ghent leads by 16 points.16
DubaiGhent
Score1834
Protected land share 50 km %47
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %5287
Park area within 2 km13 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 1 points.1
DubaiGhent
Score4950
Tourist attractions within 2 km3719
Park area within 2 km13 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Ghent leads by 9 points.9
DubaiGhent
Score3746
Notable places within 2 km3355
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 9 points.9
DubaiGhent
Score6960
Price level global63.476.2
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 10 points.10
DubaiGhent
Score6656
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months121
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2

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). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiGhent
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 56 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
BarcelonaBCN
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
ViennaVIE
5 h 40 m
€283-323
DXB · 7 km
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 56 km
MunichMUC
6 h 0 m
€306-356
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
5 h 35 m
€244-282
DXB · 7 km
2 h 0 m
€41-51
BRU · 56 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
7 h 35 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 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

MeasureDubaiGhent
Official languageArabicFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m12 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiGhent
City population3,944,751272,657
People per km²1,728
Museums within 10 km1430
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km05
Distinct cuisines in the centre5283
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Ghent 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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.