VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Lyon?

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

Your match

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Lyon
52
match

Wins on year-round weather and places to eat 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.

EdinburghLyon
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 55 points.55
EdinburghLyon
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2026
Coast distance3 km253 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 9 points.9
EdinburghLyon
Score7079
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0231,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3540
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
EdinburghLyon
Score5755
Museums within 10 km3053
Museums within 2 km of centre2225
Share of museums within 2 km %7347
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 6 points.6
EdinburghLyon
Score6458
Drinking venues within 4 km1,193866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7471
Nightclubs within 4 km6547
Nature & day trips. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
EdinburghLyon
Score3533
Protected land share 50 km %26
Landscape blanket share 50 km %16
Land share of disc %85100
Park area within 2 km166 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 13 points.13
EdinburghLyon
Score7259
Tourist attractions within 2 km8725
Park area within 2 km166 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 6 points.6
EdinburghLyon
Score6054
Notable places within 2 km12686
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 8 points.8
EdinburghLyon
Score5462
Price level global84.973.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 13 points.13
EdinburghLyon
Score5164
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm43 mm to 101 mm
Dry months00
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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghLyon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
4 h 0 m
€201-242
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
MadridMAD
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LisbonLIS
3 h 0 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 55 m
€99-141
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 30 m
€79-99
LYS · 20 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 55 m
€105-126
LYS · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 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

MeasureEdinburghLyon
Official languageEnglishFrench
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Euro (EUR)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation47 m160 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghLyon
City population488,050519,127
People per km²1,88410,838
Museums within 10 km3242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre78148
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Edinburgh or Lyon 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. 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.