VacationSelector

Ghent or Ottawa?

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 museums & heritage with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on nature & day trips and 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.

GhentOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Ghent leads by 26 points.26
GhentOttawa
Score260
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km89
Coast distance32 km423 km
Water distance32 km
Places to eat. Ghent leads by 6 points.6
GhentOttawa
Score7064
Restaurants within 2 km of centre764684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4934
Museums & heritage. Ghent leads by 26 points.26
GhentOttawa
Score5832
Museums within 10 km2415
Museums within 2 km of centre208
Share of museums within 2 km %8353
Unesco sites within 50 km51
Nightlife. Ghent leads by 5 points.5
GhentOttawa
Score4944
Drinking venues within 4 km570432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre446303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7870
Nightclubs within 4 km2635
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 7 points.7
GhentOttawa
Score3441
Protected land share 50 km %78
Landscape blanket share 50 km %40
Land share of disc %87100
Park area within 2 km84 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Ghent leads by 4 points.4
GhentOttawa
Score5046
Tourist attractions within 2 km1911
Park area within 2 km84 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Ottawa leads by 4 points.4
GhentOttawa
Score4650
Notable places within 2 km5571
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 6 points.6
GhentOttawa
Score6054
Price level global76.284
Daily budget€180
Year-round weather. Ghent leads by 3 points.3
GhentOttawa
Score5653
Monthly daytime high6.4 °C to 22 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall35 mm to 79 mm53 mm to 94 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
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGhentOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 10 m
€421
BRU · 56 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
8 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
HalifaxYHZ
6 h 30 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
1 h 45 m
€260-457
1 stop
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 2026-09 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

MeasureGhentOttawa
Official languageFrench, German, DutchFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation12 m70 m
Main airportBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year14 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureGhentOttawa
City population272,6571,017,449
People per km²1,728366
Museums within 10 km3020
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km51
Distinct cuisines in the centre8362
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 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. 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.