VacationSelector

Dubai or Ottawa?

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 value for money with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

DubaiOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 100 points.100
DubaiOttawa
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km529
Coast distance0 km423 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 2 points.2
DubaiOttawa
Score6664
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2634
Museums & heritage. Dubai leads by 6 points.6
DubaiOttawa
Score3832
Museums within 10 km2615
Museums within 2 km of centre188
Share of museums within 2 km %6953
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 9 points.9
DubaiOttawa
Score5344
Drinking venues within 4 km601432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5170
Nightclubs within 4 km8435
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 23 points.23
DubaiOttawa
Score1841
Protected land share 50 km %48
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %52100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 3 points.3
DubaiOttawa
Score4946
Tourist attractions within 2 km3711
Park area within 2 km13 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Ottawa leads by 13 points.13
DubaiOttawa
Score3750
Notable places within 2 km3371
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 15 points.15
DubaiOttawa
Score6954
Price level global63.484
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 13 points.13
DubaiOttawa
Score6653
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm53 mm to 94 mm
Dry months120
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
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9

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). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
13 h 10 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
14 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
15 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
BostonBOS, PSM
13 h 15 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
14 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
15 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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

MeasureDubaiOttawa
Official languageArabicFrench, English
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation0 m70 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiOttawa
City population3,944,7511,017,449
People per km²366
Museums within 10 km1420
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
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 Ottawa 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). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.