VacationSelector

Hamburg or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Hamburg
✓ Best match
53
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nightlife with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

HamburgOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Hamburg and Ottawa are level on 0.
HamburgOttawa
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km169
Coast distance22 km423 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Hamburg leads by 9 points.9
HamburgOttawa
Score7364
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,150684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3834
Museums & heritage. Hamburg leads by 28 points.28
HamburgOttawa
Score6032
Museums within 10 km9415
Museums within 2 km of centre508
Share of museums within 2 km %5353
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Hamburg leads by 24 points.24
HamburgOttawa
Score6844
Drinking venues within 4 km1,339432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre834303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6270
Nightclubs within 4 km11935
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 1 points.1
HamburgOttawa
Score4041
Protected land share 50 km %148
Landscape blanket share 50 km %100
Land share of disc %99100
Park area within 2 km89 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Hamburg leads by 14 points.14
HamburgOttawa
Score6046
Tourist attractions within 2 km4011
Park area within 2 km89 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Hamburg leads by 9 points.9
HamburgOttawa
Score5950
Notable places within 2 km11871
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Hamburg leads by 6 points.6
HamburgOttawa
Score6054
Price level global75.984
Daily budget€163
Year-round weather. Hamburg leads by 2 points.2
HamburgOttawa
Score5553
Monthly daytime high4.3 °C to 23.2 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall39 mm to 82 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
Hamburg
4
5
9
14
18
21
23
23
19
14
8
5
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Rainfall, mm
Hamburg
67
55
57
39
58
74
82
77
65
63
61
72
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Hamburg
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Hamburg
1
2
4
6
7
7
7
7
5
4
2
1
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Hamburg: 1991-2020 normals, Hamburg Airport (9.3 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromHamburgOttawa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€89-225
HAM · 9 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€155-168
1 stop
HAM · 9 km
7 h 20 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

MeasureHamburgOttawa
Official languageGermanFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation6 m70 m
Main airportHamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM)9 km from centre119 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureHamburgOttawa
City population1,910,1601,017,449
People per km²2,530366
Museums within 10 km7720
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre8362

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Hamburg 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. 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). 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.