VacationSelector

Geneva or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Geneva
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on museums & heritage and good for families with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on value for money 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.

GenevaOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Geneva and Ottawa are level on 0.
GenevaOttawa
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km439
Coast distance279 km423 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Geneva leads by 6 points.6
GenevaOttawa
Score7064
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,028684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3534
Museums & heritage. Geneva leads by 20 points.20
GenevaOttawa
Score5232
Museums within 10 km3515
Museums within 2 km of centre208
Share of museums within 2 km %5753
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Geneva leads by 6 points.6
GenevaOttawa
Score5044
Drinking venues within 4 km549432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre427303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7870
Nightclubs within 4 km6035
Nature & day trips. Geneva leads by 18 points.18
GenevaOttawa
Score5941
Protected land share 50 km %278
Landscape blanket share 50 km %210
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km182 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Geneva leads by 19 points.19
GenevaOttawa
Score6546
Tourist attractions within 2 km2811
Park area within 2 km182 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Geneva leads by 6 points.6
GenevaOttawa
Score5650
Notable places within 2 km9971
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ottawa leads by 19 points.19
GenevaOttawa
Score3554
Price level global110.584
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Geneva leads by 6 points.6
GenevaOttawa
Score5953
Monthly daytime high5.1 °C to 26.8 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 94 mm53 mm to 94 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
Geneva
5
7
12
16
20
24
27
26
21
16
9
6
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Rainfall, mm
Geneva
71
55
61
66
77
81
77
80
87
94
87
88
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Geneva
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Geneva
2
3
6
6
7
8
9
8
6
4
2
2
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Geneva: 1991-2020 normals, Geneve-Cointrin (5.7 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGenevaOttawa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€91-200
GVA · 5 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
€104-203
GVA · 5 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 25 m
no fares
GVA · 5 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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

MeasureGenevaOttawa
Official languageFrench, German, Italian, RomanshFrench, English
CurrencySwiss Franc (CHF)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCJ230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation403 m70 m
Main airportGeneva International Airport (GVA)5 km from centre140 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year9 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureGenevaOttawa
City population209,0611,017,449
People per km²13,148366
Museums within 10 km3520
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre8062

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Geneva or Ottawa 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.