VacationSelector

Dubai or Lima?

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.

Lima
55
match

Wins on museums & heritage and year-round weather 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.

DubaiLima
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 63 points.63
DubaiLima
Score10037
Swim season months122
Beaches 10 km5212
Coast distance0 km6 km
Water distance0 km6 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 14 points.14
DubaiLima
Score6652
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086796
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2614
Museums & heritage. Lima leads by 26 points.26
DubaiLima
Score3864
Museums within 10 km2689
Museums within 2 km of centre1847
Share of museums within 2 km %6953
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 8 points.8
DubaiLima
Score5345
Drinking venues within 4 km601409
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306177
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5143
Nightclubs within 4 km8463
Nature & day trips. Lima leads by 9 points.9
DubaiLima
Score1827
Protected land share 50 km %42
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5251
Park area within 2 km13 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Lima leads by 7 points.7
DubaiLima
Score4956
Tourist attractions within 2 km3725
Park area within 2 km13 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km44
Sights concentration. Lima leads by 9 points.9
DubaiLima
Score3746
Notable places within 2 km3354
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lima leads by 11 points.11
DubaiLima
Score6980
Price level global63.447.7
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Lima leads by 26 points.26
DubaiLima
Score6692
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C18.6 °C to 27.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm0 mm to 1 mm
Dry months1212
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
Lima
26
27
27
25
22
20
19
19
19
20
22
24
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Lima
21
22
21
20
19
18
18
17
17
17
18
19
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Lima
1
1
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Lima
13
13
12
12
12
11
12
12
12
12
13
13
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Lima
5
5
6
6
3
1
1
1
1
2
3
4

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). Lima: 1991-2020 normals, Lima-Callao / Aerop. Internacional Jorgechavez (10.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiLima
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
16 h 45 m
€1,139-1335
DXB · 7 km
4 h 25 m
€256
LIM · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 50 m
€895-903
LIM · 9 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 45 m
€282-372
LIM · 9 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
15 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 40 m
€403-426
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
BogotaBOG
16 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
Mexico CityMEX, NLU, TLC
17 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 40 m
€348-370
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
13 h 5 m
€876-946
1 stop
LIM · 9 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
13 h 10 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
8 h 10 m
no fares
LIM · 9 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
LIM · 9 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

MeasureDubaiLima
Official languageArabicSpanish, Aymara, Quechua
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Sol (PEN)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC-5
Emergency number112111 or 911
Elevation0 m154 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsJorge Chávez International Airport (LIM)9 km from centre63 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiLima
City population3,944,7519,943,800
People per km²3,721
Museums within 10 km1446
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre5233
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Lima 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. 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.