VacationSelector

Dublin or London?

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

Your match

Dublin
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

London
✓ Best match
64
match

Wins on nightlife and sights concentration with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Dublin if you want the coast in the trip: beaches within reach, and a compact centre where the bars, museums and sights sit close enough to walk between.

Choose London if the city itself is the point: far more places to eat, far more to drink and dance in, more museums, and more to keep children occupied, with July highs near 24°C.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

DublinLondon
Beaches & swimming. Dublin leads by 49 points.49
DublinLondon
Score490
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1147
Coast distance3 km43 km
Water distance3 km—
Places to eat. London leads by 18 points.18
DublinLondon
Score7088
Restaurants within 2 km of centre9203,317
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3740
Museums & heritage. London leads by 17 points.17
DublinLondon
Score5572
Museums within 10 km47148
Museums within 2 km of centre3749
Share of museums within 2 km %7933
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. London leads by 31 points.31
DublinLondon
Score6495
Drinking venues within 4 km1,2395,327
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre9342,443
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7546
Nightclubs within 4 km40312
Nature & day trips. London leads by 14 points.14
DublinLondon
Score2640
Protected land share 50 km %316
Landscape blanket share 50 km %014
Land share of disc %6297
Park area within 2 km43 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. London leads by 21 points.21
DublinLondon
Score5475
Tourist attractions within 2 km4185
Park area within 2 km43 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. London leads by 27 points.27
DublinLondon
Score6289
Notable places within 2 km141649
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Dublin leads by 3 points.3
DublinLondon
Score5754
Price level global80.284.9
Daily budget€187—
Year-round weather. London leads by 9 points.9
DublinLondon
Score5463
Monthly daytime high8.2 °C to 19.5 °C8.2 °C to 23.8 °C
Monthly rainfall52 mm to 83 mm38 mm to 67 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Dublin is the one with swimming in range: 11 beaches near the city and sea that peaks at 15°C in August. Its centre is also tightly drawn, so most of its bars and museums are a short walk apart rather than a journey.

London answers with scale: many times as many places to drink and to dance, and many times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre. About half its drinking venues are near the centre, so a night out can mean crossing town.

Where they are alike

Weather is where they are nearest. Both bottom out at 8°C in January and peak in July, and neither has a dry season: rain falls in every month of the year.

Both also work as museum trips, with heritage within day-trip reach, and both keep their collections close to the centre. Neither is primarily a nature destination: in both cases what is inside the city counts for more than what lies outside it.

Which traveller are you?

Anyone travelling for restaurants and late nights should take London: far more kitchens near the centre and many times as many bars and clubs, though Dublin's are packed into a smaller, more walkable area.

Families are better served in London, with about twice as many attractions and twice as much park space near the centre, and 3 theme parks within reach against Dublin's 1.

Anyone who wants sea should look to Dublin for a beach day, with 11 beaches nearby, though the water tops out at 15°C. For protected countryside on day trips, London has the wider choice, at 16% of the surrounding land.

What the numbers don't tell you

No cost comparison is possible here. The dataset gives Dublin a daily budget of €187 and gives London no equivalent figure at all, so nothing here tells you which city is the cheaper trip; the value ratings rest on a different measure both cities do have.

Dublin's edge on beaches is real but narrow in practice: the sea never passes 15°C, even in August, and its warmest months are also among its wetter ones. In London, only about half the drinking venues sit near the centre, so its nightlife advantage assumes you are willing to cross the city for it.

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
Dublin
8
9
10
12
15
18
20
19
17
14
10
8
London
8
9
12
15
18
22
24
23
20
16
11
9
Sea temperature, °C
Dublin
9
8
8
9
11
13
15
15
15
13
12
11
London
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Dublin
62
52
52
55
58
65
62
74
61
78
83
72
London
59
45
38
43
46
47
46
53
51
64
67
57
Daylight, hours per day
Dublin
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
London
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Dublin
2
3
4
5
6
6
5
5
4
3
2
2
London
2
3
4
6
6
6
7
6
5
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Dublin: 1991-2020 normals, Dublin Airport (9.3 km from centre). London: 1991-2020 normals, London Heathrow Airport (22.5 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Dublin peaks in July and August, when highs reach 20°C and the sea is at its warmest, 15°C. August is one of its wetter months at 74mm, so May and June, cooler but no damper, are a fair alternative.

London's warm window is longer and drier: June to August run at 22-24°C with less rain than Dublin sees, and March and April are its driest months. Late autumn is the poor bet in both cities.

Getting there

Flying fromDublinLondon
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 35 m
€80-139
DUB · 9 km
1 h 5 m
€146-170
LHR · 23 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
2 h 35 m
€119-292
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 35 m
€43-47
DUB · 9 km
1 h 5 m
€92-144
LHR · 23 km
FaroFAO
2 h 50 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LGW · 40 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
7 h 10 m
€518-651
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€71-105
DUB · 9 km
2 h 0 m
€61-144
LGW · 40 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 20 m
€53-95
DUB · 9 km
1 h 45 m
€83-138
LGW · 40 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
3 h 20 m
€128-183
1 stop
LGW · 40 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 40 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
11 h 30 m
€665-831
1 stop
LHR · 23 km
CancunCUN
9 h 30 m
no fares
DUB · 9 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
LGW · 40 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

MeasureDublinLondon
Official languageEnglish, IrishEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112112 or 999
Elevation20 m4 m
Main airportDublin Airport (DUB)9 km from centre201 non-stop destinationsLondon Heathrow Airport (LHR)23 km from centre220 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureDublinLondon
City population592,7138,799,728
People per km²5,1545,598
Museums within 10 km40215
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre74116
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Dublin or London 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.