VacationSelector

Edinburgh or New Orleans?

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 good for families and sights concentration with your weighting.

New Orleans
47
match

Wins on 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.

EdinburghNew Orleans
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 16 points.16
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score5539
Swim season months07
Beaches 10 km203
Coast distance3 km21 km
Water distance3 km17 km
Places to eat. Edinburgh leads by 9 points.9
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score7061
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,023803
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3525
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 12 points.12
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score5745
Museums within 10 km3042
Museums within 2 km of centre2230
Share of museums within 2 km %7371
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 10 points.10
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score6454
Drinking venues within 4 km1,193704
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884495
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7470
Nightclubs within 4 km6541
Nature & day trips. Edinburgh leads by 10 points.10
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score3525
Protected land share 50 km %24
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %8589
Park area within 2 km166 hectares43 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 26 points.26
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score7246
Tourist attractions within 2 km8722
Park area within 2 km166 hectares43 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 20 points.20
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score6040
Notable places within 2 km12640
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. New Orleans leads by 17 points.17
EdinburghNew Orleans
Score5168
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C17.1 °C to 33 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm94 mm to 194 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
New Orleans
17
19
23
26
30
32
33
33
31
27
22
18
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
New Orleans
14
15
18
22
25
29
30
30
28
24
20
16
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
New Orleans
132
104
111
132
143
194
169
180
128
94
98
123
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
New Orleans
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
New Orleans
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). New Orleans: 1991-2020 normals, New Orleans Airport (2.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghNew Orleans
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 55 m
€254-325
1 stop
MSY · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
7 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 15 m
€208-268
1 stop
MSY · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 30 m
€106-150
1 stop
MSY · 18 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
8 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
CancunCUN
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 78 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
BostonBOS, PSM
6 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
6 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
MSY · 18 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

MeasureEdinburghNew Orleans
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation47 m-2 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsLouis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY)18 km from centre50 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghNew Orleans
City population488,050383,997
People per km²1,884423
Museums within 10 km3216
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre7839
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone7 months

Where else could you go?

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