VacationSelector

Dubai or Salzburg?

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 places to eat with your weighting.

Salzburg
42
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nature & day trips 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.

DubaiSalzburg
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 100 points.100
DubaiSalzburg
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km529
Coast distance0 km653 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 17 points.17
DubaiSalzburg
Score6649
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086348
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2623
Museums & heritage. Salzburg leads by 22 points.22
DubaiSalzburg
Score3860
Museums within 10 km2642
Museums within 2 km of centre1827
Share of museums within 2 km %6964
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 17 points.17
DubaiSalzburg
Score5336
Drinking venues within 4 km601294
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306241
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5182
Nightclubs within 4 km8416
Nature & day trips. Salzburg leads by 9 points.9
DubaiSalzburg
Score1827
Protected land share 50 km %46
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %52100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares39 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 1 points.1
DubaiSalzburg
Score4948
Tourist attractions within 2 km3717
Park area within 2 km13 hectares39 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km44
Sights concentration. Salzburg leads by 9 points.9
DubaiSalzburg
Score3746
Notable places within 2 km3354
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 10 points.10
DubaiSalzburg
Score6959
Price level global63.476.9
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 12 points.12
DubaiSalzburg
Score6654
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C3.4 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm47 mm to 168 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
Salzburg
3
6
10
16
20
23
25
25
20
15
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Salzburg
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Salzburg
62
47
83
80
142
168
159
167
127
90
70
67
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Salzburg
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Salzburg
3
3
5
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
3
2

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). Salzburg: 1991-2020 normals, Salzburg (3.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiSalzburg
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 25 m
€227-312
1 stop
MUC · 112 km
BarcelonaBCN
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 55 m
€166-216
MUC · 112 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 30 m
€183-250
MUC · 112 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
8 h 15 m
no fares
MUC · 112 km
AthensATH
4 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
MUC · 112 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
1 h 55 m
€186-283
SZG · 3 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
5 h 35 m
€244-282
DXB · 7 km
1 h 35 m
€226-261
MUC · 112 km
ViennaVIE
5 h 40 m
€283-323
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€183-262
1 stop
MUC · 112 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
6 h 25 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
MUC · 112 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
12 h 15 m
no fares
MUC · 112 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

MeasureDubaiSalzburg
Official languageArabicGerman, Austrian Sign Language
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m424 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsSalzburg Airport (SZG)3 km from centre62 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiSalzburg
City population3,944,751155,021
People per km²2,360
Museums within 10 km1438
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre5250
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 Salzburg 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. 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.