VacationSelector

Galway or Inverness?

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

Your match

Galway
✓ Best match
39
match

Wins on nature & day trips and good for families with your weighting.

Inverness
25
match

Wins on 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.

Scoreboard

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

GalwayInverness
Beaches & swimming. Galway leads by 23 points.23
GalwayInverness
Score5128
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km131
Coast distance1 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Galway leads by 16 points.16
GalwayInverness
Score3721
Restaurants within 2 km of centre173114
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2011
Museums & heritage. Galway and Inverness are level on 20.
GalwayInverness
Score2020
Museums within 10 km56
Museums within 2 km of centre55
Share of museums within 2 km %10083
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Galway leads by 11 points.11
GalwayInverness
Score2615
Drinking venues within 4 km185113
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre15398
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8387
Nightclubs within 4 km84
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 46 points.46
GalwayInverness
Score559
Protected land share 50 km %—12
Landscape blanket share 50 km %011
Land share of disc %8588
Park area within 2 km65 hectares3 hectares
Good for families. Galway leads by 25 points.25
GalwayInverness
Score250
Tourist attractions within 2 km53
Park area within 2 km65 hectares3 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Inverness leads by 2 points.2
GalwayInverness
Score2224
Notable places within 2 km1416
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Galway leads by 3 points.3
GalwayInverness
Score5754
Price level global80.284.9
Daily budget€187—
Year-round weather. Galway leads by 2 points.2
GalwayInverness
Score5452
Monthly daytime high8.9 °C to 19.6 °C6.6 °C to 18.9 °C
Monthly rainfall63 mm to 113 mm40 mm to 72 mm
Dry months01
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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
Daylight, hours per day
Galway
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
2
2
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre). Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGalwayInverness
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
ManchesterMAN
1 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
KrakowKRK
3 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
FaroFAO
2 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
AlicanteALC
2 h 40 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 50 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 0 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
EdinburghEDI
1 h 15 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
SYY · 149 km
ReusREU
2 h 25 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 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

MeasureGalwayInverness
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
Elevation25 m7 m
Main airportShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinationsInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureGalwayInverness
City population83,45647,380
People per km²1,5632,289
Museums within 10 km43
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre2515
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Galway or Inverness 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.