VacationSelector

Dubai or Stockholm?

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 beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Stockholm
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

DubaiStockholm
Beaches & swimming. Dubai leads by 40 points.40
DubaiStockholm
Score10060
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km5273
Coast distance0 km0 km
Water distance0 km0 km
Places to eat. Stockholm leads by 10 points.10
DubaiStockholm
Score6676
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0861,558
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2636
Museums & heritage. Stockholm leads by 31 points.31
DubaiStockholm
Score3869
Museums within 10 km2674
Museums within 2 km of centre1847
Share of museums within 2 km %6964
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. Stockholm leads by 11 points.11
DubaiStockholm
Score5364
Drinking venues within 4 km6011,090
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre306689
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5163
Nightclubs within 4 km84106
Nature & day trips. Stockholm leads by 23 points.23
DubaiStockholm
Score1841
Protected land share 50 km %47
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5277
Park area within 2 km13 hectares104 hectares
Good for families. Stockholm leads by 8 points.8
DubaiStockholm
Score4957
Tourist attractions within 2 km3723
Park area within 2 km13 hectares104 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km42
Sights concentration. Stockholm leads by 42 points.42
DubaiStockholm
Score3779
Notable places within 2 km33357
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dubai leads by 12 points.12
DubaiStockholm
Score6957
Price level global63.480.3
Daily budget€169
Year-round weather. Dubai leads by 13 points.13
DubaiStockholm
Score6653
Monthly daytime high24.5 °C to 42.1 °C1 °C to 23.6 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 21 mm27 mm to 66 mm
Dry months125
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
Stockholm
1
1
5
11
17
21
24
22
17
10
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Dubai
23
22
23
25
29
31
33
33
33
31
28
25
Stockholm
3
2
2
3
7
12
16
17
14
10
7
5
Rainfall, mm
Dubai
21
6
11
7
0
0
0
0
0
0
9
18
Stockholm
37
29
27
29
34
61
60
66
53
51
47
47
Daylight, hours per day
Dubai
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Stockholm
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Sunshine, hours per day
Dubai
No sunshine record
Stockholm
1
2
5
7
9
9
9
8
6
3
1
1

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). Stockholm: 1991-2020 normals, Stockholm Observatoriet (26.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromDubaiStockholm
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€226-241
DXB · 7 km
2 h 25 m
€89-139
ARN · 36 km
CopenhagenCPH
6 h 20 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 20 m
€84-99
ARN · 36 km
AmsterdamAMS
6 h 45 m
€334-439
DXB · 7 km
2 h 0 m
€153-185
ARN · 36 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 15 m
€175-294
DXB · 7 km
3 h 15 m
€138-141
ARN · 36 km
OsloOSL, TRF
6 h 45 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 5 m
€77-102
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
HelsinkiHEL
6 h 0 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
1 h 10 m
€66-74
ARN · 36 km
MunichMUC
6 h 0 m
€306-356
1 stop
DXB · 7 km
2 h 15 m
€202-238
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
ViennaVIE
5 h 40 m
€283-323
DXB · 7 km
2 h 10 m
€86
ARN · 36 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
13 h 35 m
€476-487
DXB · 7 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
6 h 25 m
no fares
DXB · 7 km
10 h 25 m
€526-560
1 stop
ARN · 36 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

MeasureDubaiStockholm
Official languageArabicSwedish
CurrencyUAE Dirham (AED)Swedish Krona (SEK)
SocketsCG220 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+4UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m22 m
Main airportDubai International Airport (DXB)7 km from centre292 non-stop destinationsStockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)36 km from centre172 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days

By the numbers

MeasureDubaiStockholm
City population3,944,751984,748
People per km²5,260
Museums within 10 km14266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre5281
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 Stockholm 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.