VacationSelector

Dubai or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Dubai
55
match

Wins on places to eat with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

DubaiRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Dubai and Rio de Janeiro are level on 100.
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score100100
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km5261
Coast distance0 km1 km
Water distance0 km1 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 12 points.12
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score6654
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2616
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 31 points.31
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score3869
Museums within 10 km26110
Museums within 2 km of centre1851
Share of museums within 2 km %6946
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 4 points.4
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score5357
Drinking venues within 4 km601818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5162
Nightclubs within 4 km8450
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 44 points.44
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score1862
Protected land share 50 km %421
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %5257
Park area within 2 km13 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 10 points.10
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score4959
Tourist attractions within 2 km3730
Park area within 2 km13 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 19 points.19
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score3756
Notable places within 2 km3398
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 12 points.12
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score6981
Price level global63.446.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 19 points.19
DubaiRio de Janeiro
Score6685
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm42 mm to 232 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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14

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). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiRio de Janeiro
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
16 h 45 m
€1,139-1335
DXB · 7 km
3 h 0 m
€212-267
GIG · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
6 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
LisbonLIS
7 h 55 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 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

MeasureDubaiRio de Janeiro
Official languageArabicPortuguese
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation0 m31 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiRio de Janeiro
City population3,944,7516,211,223
People per km²4,930
Museums within 10 km1470
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre5227
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dubai or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.