VacationSelector

Glasgow or Lucerne?

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

Your match

Glasgow
✓ Best match
48
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

Lucerne
33
match

Wins on year-round weather 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.

GlasgowLucerne
Beaches & swimming. Glasgow leads by 36 points.36
GlasgowLucerne
Score360
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km316
Coast distance3 km669 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Glasgow leads by 16 points.16
GlasgowLucerne
Score6347
Restaurants within 2 km of centre740269
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2925
Museums & heritage. Glasgow leads by 5 points.5
GlasgowLucerne
Score4540
Museums within 10 km3223
Museums within 2 km of centre1313
Share of museums within 2 km %4157
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Glasgow leads by 35 points.35
GlasgowLucerne
Score6328
Drinking venues within 4 km1,078202
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre654151
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6175
Nightclubs within 4 km7311
Nature & day trips. Glasgow leads by 13 points.13
GlasgowLucerne
Score3825
Protected land share 50 km %167
Landscape blanket share 50 km %120
Land share of disc %91100
Park area within 2 km56 hectares29 hectares
Good for families. Glasgow leads by 3 points.3
GlasgowLucerne
Score4138
Tourist attractions within 2 km1315
Park area within 2 km56 hectares29 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Glasgow leads by 18 points.18
GlasgowLucerne
Score5335
Notable places within 2 km8029
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Glasgow leads by 19 points.19
GlasgowLucerne
Score5435
Price level global84.9110.5
Daily budget€248
Year-round weather. Lucerne leads by 10 points.10
GlasgowLucerne
Score4353
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.9 °C3.6 °C to 24.3 °C
Monthly rainfall102 mm to 207 mm60 mm to 128 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
Glasgow
7
7
9
12
15
18
19
19
16
13
9
7
Lucerne
4
5
10
15
19
22
24
24
19
14
8
4
Sea temperature, °C
Glasgow
8
7
7
8
10
13
15
15
14
12
11
9
Lucerne
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Glasgow
207
170
147
102
103
111
129
145
132
185
190
205
Lucerne
62
60
71
80
126
128
126
119
87
85
76
84
Daylight, hours per day
Glasgow
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Lucerne
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Glasgow
1
2
3
4
5
4
4
4
3
2
2
1
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. Glasgow: 1991-2020 normals, Glasgow Airport (11.5 km from centre). Lucerne: 1991-2020 normals, Zurich Town / Ville. (41.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromGlasgowLucerne
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€38-45
GLA · 11 km
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 49 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
1 h 50 m
€84-103
ZRH · 49 km
MalagaAGP
3 h 10 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
ZRH · 49 km
BerlinBER
2 h 5 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
1 h 25 m
€140-176
ZRH · 49 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
1 h 25 m
€234-276
ZRH · 49 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 40 m
€171-239
1 stop
GLA · 11 km
3 h 15 m
€154-180
ZRH · 49 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
1 h 40 m
€114-151
ZRH · 49 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 45 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
8 h 5 m
€606-782
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
7 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 49 km
CancunCUN
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
10 h 55 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

MeasureGlasgowLucerne
Official languageEnglishFrench, German, Italian, Romansh
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Swiss Franc (CHF)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzCJ230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112
Elevation21 m436 m
Main airportGlasgow Airport (GLA)11 km from centre95 non-stop destinationsZürich Airport (ZRH)49 km from centre181 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureGlasgowLucerne
City population626,41086,234
People per km²1902,963
Museums within 10 km2914
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre5446
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Glasgow 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). 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.