VacationSelector

Dubai or San Jose?

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.

San Jose
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips and year-round weather 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.

DubaiSan Jose
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 92 points.92
DubaiSan Jose
Score1008
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km521
Coast distance0 km14 km
Water distance0 km14 km
Places to eat. Dubai leads by 25 points.25
DubaiSan Jose
Score6641
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,086313
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2616
Museums & heritage. Dubai leads by 12 points.12
DubaiSan Jose
Score3826
Museums within 10 km2620
Museums within 2 km of centre189
Share of museums within 2 km %6945
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Dubai leads by 22 points.22
DubaiSan Jose
Score5331
Drinking venues within 4 km601231
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre30688
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5138
Nightclubs within 4 km8416
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 52 points.52
DubaiSan Jose
Score1870
Protected land share 50 km %426
Landscape blanket share 50 km %02
Land share of disc %5291
Park area within 2 km13 hectares101 hectares
Good for families. Dubai leads by 16 points.16
DubaiSan Jose
Score4933
Tourist attractions within 2 km372
Park area within 2 km13 hectares101 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Dubai leads by 23 points.23
DubaiSan Jose
Score3714
Notable places within 2 km339
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 26 points.26
DubaiSan Jose
Score6943
Price level global63.4100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 19 points.19
DubaiSan Jose
Score6685
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C15.4 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm0 mm to 78 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
San Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10

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). San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiSan Jose
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
SeoulICN, GMP
8 h 35 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 57 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
15 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
13 h 20 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
6 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
6 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
13 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
BostonBOS, PSM
13 h 15 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 57 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

MeasureDubaiSan Jose
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 m25 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiSan Jose
City population3,944,7511,013,240
People per km²2,167
Museums within 10 km1419
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre5230
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 monthsNone

Where else could you go?

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