VacationSelector

Dubai or Limassol?

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 good for families and places to eat with your weighting.

Limassol
46
match

Wins on year-round weather and museums & heritage 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.

DubaiLimassol
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 21 points.21
DubaiLimassol
Score10079
Swim season months126
Beaches 10 km5227
Coast distance0 km1 km
Water distance0 km1 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 23 points.23
DubaiLimassol
Score6643
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086298
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2619
Museums & heritage. Limassol leads by 6 points.6
DubaiLimassol
Score3844
Museums within 10 km2617
Museums within 2 km of centre1810
Share of museums within 2 km %6959
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 14 points.14
DubaiLimassol
Score5339
Drinking venues within 4 km601340
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306256
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5175
Nightclubs within 4 km8420
Nature & day trips. Limassol leads by 4 points.4
DubaiLimassol
Score1822
Protected land share 50 km %42
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5249
Park area within 2 km13 hectares32 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 33 points.33
DubaiLimassol
Score4916
Tourist attractions within 2 km373
Park area within 2 km13 hectares32 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km40
Sights concentration. Dubai leads by 23 points.23
DubaiLimassol
Score3714
Notable places within 2 km339
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Limassol leads by 1 points.1
DubaiLimassol
Score6970
Price level global63.461.4
Daily budget€129
Year-round weather. Limassol leads by 19 points.19
DubaiLimassol
Score6685
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C16.5 °C to 31.2 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm0 mm to 98 mm
Dry months128
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
Limassol
17
17
19
22
25
29
31
31
30
27
23
19
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Limassol
18
17
17
18
20
23
26
27
26
25
22
20
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Limassol
81
47
29
17
10
2
1
0
5
14
42
98
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Limassol
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
14
12
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Limassol
6
6
8
9
11
12
13
12
10
9
7
6

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). Limassol: 1998-2020 (sunshine 1991-2020, rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Akrotiri (11.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiLimassol
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
4 h 25 m
€125-167
PFO · 51 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
3 h 10 m
€318-438
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€149-173
PFO · 51 km
ManchesterMAN
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
PFO · 51 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
5 h 35 m
€244-282
DXB · 7 km
3 h 10 m
€123-135
PFO · 51 km
ViennaVIE
5 h 40 m
€283-323
DXB · 7 km
3 h 0 m
€206-323
1 stop
PFO · 51 km
BudapestBUD
5 h 25 m
€345-378
DXB · 7 km
2 h 45 m
€143-223
PFO · 51 km
BucharestOTP, BBU
4 h 40 m
€263-354
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
2 h 5 m
€110-159
PFO · 51 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
ECN · 68 km
BirminghamBHX
7 h 15 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 35 m
no fares
PFO · 51 km
AlmatyALA
4 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 10 m
€377-465
2 stops
LCA · 58 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

MeasureDubaiLimassol
Official languageArabicTurkish, Greek, Modern Greek
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzG240 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m10 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsLarnaca International Airport (LCA)58 km from centre109 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year17 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiLimassol
City population3,944,751107,970
People per km²2,405
Museums within 10 km142
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre5228
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months6 months

Where else could you go?

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