VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Montpellier?

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 museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Montpellier
47
match

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

EdinburghMontpellier
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 23 points.23
EdinburghMontpellier
Score5532
Swim season months02
Beaches 10 km208
Coast distance3 km9 km
Water distance3 km9 km
Places to eat. Edinburgh leads by 5 points.5
EdinburghMontpellier
Score7065
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,023737
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3534
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 31 points.31
EdinburghMontpellier
Score5726
Museums within 10 km3014
Museums within 2 km of centre223
Share of museums within 2 km %7321
Unesco sites within 50 km32
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 26 points.26
EdinburghMontpellier
Score6438
Drinking venues within 4 km1,193318
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884265
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7483
Nightclubs within 4 km6525
Nature & day trips. Montpellier leads by 8 points.8
EdinburghMontpellier
Score3543
Protected land share 50 km %215
Landscape blanket share 50 km %110
Land share of disc %8570
Park area within 2 km166 hectares55 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 28 points.28
EdinburghMontpellier
Score7244
Tourist attractions within 2 km878
Park area within 2 km166 hectares55 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km07
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 22 points.22
EdinburghMontpellier
Score6038
Notable places within 2 km12635
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Montpellier leads by 8 points.8
EdinburghMontpellier
Score5462
Price level global84.973.7
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Montpellier leads by 23 points.23
EdinburghMontpellier
Score5174
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C12 °C to 29.6 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm17 mm to 93 mm
Dry months05
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
Montpellier
12
13
16
19
23
27
30
29
25
21
16
13
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Montpellier
12
12
12
14
16
19
21
22
20
18
16
14
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Montpellier
56
35
39
56
46
33
17
36
88
93
78
59
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Montpellier
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
Montpellier
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
10
8
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Montpellier: 1991-2020 normals, Montpellier (7.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghMontpellier
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
MadridMAD
2 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
BordeauxBOD
2 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MunichMUC
2 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
LisbonLIS
3 h 0 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 10 m
€136-184
1 stop
MRS · 109 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
MRS · 109 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
MPL · 8 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
6 h 25 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 109 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

MeasureEdinburghMontpellier
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 m7 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsMontpellier-Méditerranée Airport (MPL)8 km from centre36 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghMontpellier
City population488,050310,240
People per km²1,8845,452
Museums within 10 km3214
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km32
Distinct cuisines in the centre7865
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone2 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Edinburgh or Montpellier 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.