VacationSelector

Dubai or Portland?

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.

Portland
42
match

Wins on nature & day trips and places to eat 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.

DubaiPortland
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 100 points.100
DubaiPortland
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km5227
Coast distance0 km69 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 8 points.8
DubaiPortland
Score6674
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0861,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2644
Museums & heritage. Dubai leads by 3 points.3
DubaiPortland
Score3835
Museums within 10 km2623
Museums within 2 km of centre1815
Share of museums within 2 km %6965
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Portland leads by 5 points.5
DubaiPortland
Score5358
Drinking venues within 4 km601942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5155
Nightclubs within 4 km8432
Nature & day trips. Portland leads by 17 points.17
DubaiPortland
Score1835
Protected land share 50 km %413
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %52100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 15 points.15
DubaiPortland
Score4934
Tourist attractions within 2 km378
Park area within 2 km13 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Dubai leads by 2 points.2
DubaiPortland
Score3735
Notable places within 2 km3329
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 26 points.26
DubaiPortland
Score6943
Price level global63.4100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 1 points.1
DubaiPortland
Score6665
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months123
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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Portland
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). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiPortland
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
16 h 25 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
14 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
14 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
16 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
15 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
15 h 5 m
no fares
AUH · 114 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
BostonBOS, PSM
13 h 15 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 25 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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 2026-09 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

MeasureDubaiPortland
Official languageArabic
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation0 m152 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiPortland
City population3,944,751652,503
People per km²1,736
Museums within 10 km1417
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre5282
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 Portland 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.