VacationSelector

Ghent or Lucerne?

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

Your match

Ghent
✓ Best match
50
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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.

GhentLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Ghent leads by 26 points.26
GhentLucerne
Score260
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km816
Coast distance32 km669 km
Water distance32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 23 points.23
GhentLucerne
Score7047
Restaurants within 2 km of centre764269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4925
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 18 points.18
GhentLucerne
Score5840
Museums within 10 km2423
Museums within 2 km of centre2013
Share of museums within 2 km %8357
Unesco sites within 50 km51
Nightlife. Ghent leads by 21 points.21
GhentLucerne
Score4928
Drinking venues within 4 km570202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre446151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7875
Nightclubs within 4 km2611
Nature & day trips. Ghent leads by 9 points.9
GhentLucerne
Score3425
Protected land share 50 km %77
Landscape blanket share 50 km %40
Land share of disc %87100
Park area within 2 km84 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 12 points.12
GhentLucerne
Score5038
Tourist attractions within 2 km1915
Park area within 2 km84 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Ghent leads by 11 points.11
GhentLucerne
Score4635
Notable places within 2 km5529
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 25 points.25
GhentLucerne
Score6035
Price level global76.2110.5
Daily budget€180€248
Year-round weather. Ghent leads by 3 points.3
GhentLucerne
Score5653
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm60 mm to 128 mm
Dry months10
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
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
Lucerne
2
3
5
6
6
7
7
7
5
3
2
1

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGhentLucerne
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 49 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
2 h 5 m
€158-220
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
1 h 40 m
€114-151
ZRH · 49 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 56 km
2 h 45 m
€110-133
ZRH · 49 km
ViennaVIE
1 h 45 m
€93-156
BRU · 56 km
1 h 25 m
€174-215
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
8 h 5 m
€606-782
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
BerlinBER
1 h 25 m
€115-161
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
1 h 25 m
€140-176
ZRH · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
11 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
11 h 20 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 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

MeasureGhentLucerne
Official languageFrench, German, DutchFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation12 m436 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureGhentLucerne
City population272,65786,234
People per km²1,7282,963
Museums within 10 km3014
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km51
Distinct cuisines in the centre8346
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

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