VacationSelector

Dubai or Santiago?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Dubai
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Santiago
55
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.

DubaiSantiago
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 100 points.100
DubaiSantiago
Score1000
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km520
Coast distance0 km89 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Santiago leads by 6 points.6
DubaiSantiago
Score6672
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0861,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2632
Museums & heritage. Santiago leads by 7 points.7
DubaiSantiago
Score3845
Museums within 10 km2687
Museums within 2 km of centre1830
Share of museums within 2 km %6934
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Santiago leads by 8 points.8
DubaiSantiago
Score5361
Drinking venues within 4 km601912
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306542
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5159
Nightclubs within 4 km84112
Nature & day trips. Santiago leads by 34 points.34
DubaiSantiago
Score1852
Protected land share 50 km %417
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %52100
Park area within 2 km13 hectares88 hectares
Good for families. Dubai and Santiago are level on 49.
DubaiSantiago
Score4949
Tourist attractions within 2 km3712
Park area within 2 km13 hectares88 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. Santiago leads by 11 points.11
DubaiSantiago
Score3748
Notable places within 2 km3362
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Santiago leads by 12 points.12
DubaiSantiago
Score6981
Price level global63.446.2
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Santiago leads by 19 points.19
DubaiSantiago
Score6685
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C14.3 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm0 mm to 87 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
Santiago
28
27
26
21
18
15
14
16
19
22
25
27
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Santiago
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Santiago
0
2
5
16
46
87
52
44
27
11
6
3
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Santiago
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Santiago
11
9
8
6
5
3
4
5
6
8
9
11

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). Santiago: 1991-2020 normals, Santiago Q. Normal (3.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiSantiago
Buenos AiresEZE, AEP
16 h 45 m
€1,139-1335
DXB · 7 km
2 h 0 m
€140-179
SCL · 14 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
16 h 5 m
€960-1123
SCL · 14 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
14 h 25 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
15 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
3 h 45 m
€267-313
SCL · 14 km
BogotaBOG
16 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
5 h 40 m
€340-367
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
Rio de JaneiroGIG, SDU, RRJ
14 h 40 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
MadridMAD
7 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
13 h 15 m
€799-1378
1 stop
SCL · 14 km
MiamiMIA, OPF
15 h 30 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
8 h 30 m
no fares
SCL · 14 km
SydneySYD, WSI
14 h 50 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
14 h 0 m
€1,325-1342
1 stop
SCL · 14 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

MeasureDubaiSantiago
Official languageArabicSpanish
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Chilean Peso (CLP)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCL220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC-4, UTC-3 in summer
Emergency number112Police 133/134, ambulance 131, fire 132
Elevation0 m575 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsComodoro Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport (SCL)14 km from centre68 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiSantiago
City population3,944,7516,257,516
People per km²7,468
Museums within 10 km1454
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre5264
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 Santiago 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). 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.