VacationSelector

Fort Lauderdale or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Fort Lauderdale
45
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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.

Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Fort Lauderdale leads by 29 points.29
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score8455
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km719
Coast distance0 km4 km
Water distance0 km4 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 30 points.30
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score4575
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3711,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1829
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 29 points.29
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score2049
Museums within 10 km1442
Museums within 2 km of centre624
Share of museums within 2 km %4357
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 40 points.40
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score3474
Drinking venues within 4 km2591,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1441,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5662
Nightclubs within 4 km18124
Nature & day trips. Fort Lauderdale leads by 38 points.38
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score8143
Protected land share 50 km %206
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %5181
Park area within 2 km45 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 41 points.41
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score1960
Tourist attractions within 2 km226
Park area within 2 km45 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 57 points.57
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score057
Notable places within 2 km2103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score4350
Price level global10090.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Fort Lauderdale and Melbourne are level on 76.
Fort LauderdaleMelbourne
Score7676
Monthly daytime high24.2 °C to 32.3 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 219 mm45 mm to 69 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
Fort Lauderdale
24
26
27
29
30
31
32
32
31
30
27
26
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Fort Lauderdale
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Fort Lauderdale
55
59
57
72
159
219
166
198
202
144
91
73
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Fort Lauderdale
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Fort Lauderdale
No sunshine record
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Fort Lauderdale: 1991-2020 normals, Fort Lauderdale (7.1 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromFort LauderdaleMelbourne
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
5 h 5 m
€218-274
1 stop
FLL · 7 km
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
2 h 45 m
€133-174
FLL · 7 km
17 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 35 m
€349-373
2 stops
FLL · 7 km
15 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
15 h 30 m
€891-1074
2 stops
MIA · 41 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
15 h 10 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 55 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
SantiagoSCL
8 h 30 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
13 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 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

MeasureFort LauderdaleMelbourne
Official language–English
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number911000
Elevation11 m31 m
Main airportFort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL)7 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureFort LauderdaleMelbourne
City population182,7605,350,705
People per km²1,829535
Museums within 10 km642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre2586
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 Fort Lauderdale or Melbourne 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.