VacationSelector

Galway or Montreal?

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

Your match

Galway
39
match

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

Montreal
✓ Best match
47
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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.

GalwayMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Galway leads by 51 points.51
GalwayMontreal
Score510
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km137
Coast distance1 km276 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Montreal leads by 37 points.37
GalwayMontreal
Score3774
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1731,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2049
Museums & heritage. Montreal leads by 17 points.17
GalwayMontreal
Score2037
Museums within 10 km539
Museums within 2 km of centre519
Share of museums within 2 km %10049
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 36 points.36
GalwayMontreal
Score2662
Drinking venues within 4 km1851,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre153493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8349
Nightclubs within 4 km874
Nature & day trips. Galway leads by 19 points.19
GalwayMontreal
Score5536
Protected land share 50 km %2
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %85100
Park area within 2 km65 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Montreal leads by 25 points.25
GalwayMontreal
Score2550
Tourist attractions within 2 km511
Park area within 2 km65 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 34 points.34
GalwayMontreal
Score2256
Notable places within 2 km1498
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Galway leads by 3 points.3
GalwayMontreal
Score5754
Price level global80.284
Daily budget€187
Year-round weather. Galway leads by 4 points.4
GalwayMontreal
Score5450
Monthly daytime high8.9 °C to 19.6 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall63 mm to 113 mm69 mm to 121 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
Galway
9
10
11
14
16
19
20
19
18
14
11
9
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Sea temperature, °C
Galway
9
9
9
10
12
14
16
16
15
14
12
10
Montreal
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Galway
100
87
76
63
63
72
76
89
77
101
104
113
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Galway
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Galway
2
2
4
5
6
5
4
5
4
3
2
2
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Galway: 1991-2020 normals, Shannon Airport (64.2 km from centre). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGalwayMontreal
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 30 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
BostonBOS, PSM
6 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 25 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
DublinDUB
1 h 0 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
6 h 15 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 45 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
2 h 10 m
no fares
KIR · 125 km
7 h 35 m
€591-764
2 stops
YUL · 16 km
MalagaAGP
2 h 50 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
7 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
PortoOPO
2 h 10 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
EdinburghEDI
1 h 15 m
no fares
SNN · 64 km
6 h 25 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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

MeasureGalwayMontreal
Official languageEnglish, IrishFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation25 m31 m
Main airportShannon Airport (SNN)64 km from centre36 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureGalwayMontreal
City population83,4561,895,211
People per km²1,5633,806
Museums within 10 km437
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre2597
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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