VacationSelector

Interlaken or Lyon?

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

Your match

Interlaken
23
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

Lyon
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Interlaken if the trip is really about the land around it: 19% of that land is protected against 6% around Lyon, and its drier months mean fewer washed-out days.

Choose Lyon if you want a city to eat and go out in, with far more restaurants, bars and museums near the centre, and warmer days across the year at 7-28°C.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

InterlakenLyon
Beaches & swimming. Interlaken and Lyon are level on 0.
InterlakenLyon
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1226
Coast distance713 km253 km
Water distance——
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 50 points.50
InterlakenLyon
Score2979
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1181,691
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1740
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 32 points.32
InterlakenLyon
Score2355
Museums within 10 km553
Museums within 2 km of centre225
Share of museums within 2 km %4047
Unesco sites within 50 km22
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 54 points.54
InterlakenLyon
Score458
Drinking venues within 4 km42866
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre38611
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %9071
Nightclubs within 4 km347
Nature & day trips. Lyon leads by 6 points.6
InterlakenLyon
Score2733
Protected land share 50 km %196
Landscape blanket share 50 km %06
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km5 hectares120 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 45 points.45
InterlakenLyon
Score1459
Tourist attractions within 2 km1125
Park area within 2 km5 hectares120 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 32 points.32
InterlakenLyon
Score2254
Notable places within 2 km1486
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 27 points.27
InterlakenLyon
Score3562
Price level global110.573.7
Daily budget€248€160
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 7 points.7
InterlakenLyon
Score5764
Monthly daytime high2.8 °C to 23.6 °C7 °C to 28 °C
Monthly rainfall34 mm to 68 mm43 mm to 101 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

Interlaken's edge is the land around it: 19% of that land is protected against 6% around Lyon, and it gets three months at 40mm of rain or less, which Lyon never manages.

Lyon leads on everything that involves other people: many times as many restaurants near the centre and a wider range of kitchens, many times as many bars and clubs, and many times as many museums. For families, about twice as many attractions near the centre and two theme parks within reach, where Interlaken has none.

Where they are alike

Neither is a swimming destination. Both list beaches nearby, 12 around Interlaken and 26 around Lyon, but neither has a month of water at 21°C or more, so a dip is an occasional summer afternoon rather than a reason to book.

They are also close on countryside access and on the shape of the year. Both have protected land and day trips within reach, and both run to the same calendar, warmest in July and coldest in January.

Which traveller are you?

A traveller going for food and evenings out should take Lyon: many times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, and many times as many bars and clubs, most of them centrally placed.

A walker after open country will get more from Interlaken, where 19% of the surrounding land is protected against 6% around Lyon, and where summer days reach 24°C without the heat of a large city.

Families are better served in Lyon, with about twice as many attractions near the centre, far more park space close in, and two theme parks within reach, where Interlaken has none at all.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €248 for Interlaken's country against €160 for Lyon's, are national price levels for restaurants and hotels, not measurements of either place. A small resort town and a large city can each sit a long way from their own country's average, so treat these as background rather than as a ranking of the two.

No weather station near Interlaken records sunshine hours, so that figure is missing rather than low, and its monthly picture rests on temperature and rainfall alone. Lyon's 1977 recorded hours therefore have nothing on the other side to be set against.

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
Interlaken
3
5
9
15
17
22
24
23
18
14
7
4
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Interlaken
53
41
37
34
52
48
62
61
38
43
51
68
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Daylight, hours per day
Interlaken
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
9
9
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Interlaken
No sunshine record
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Interlaken: 2005-2020 (rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Meiringen / Unterbach (19.3 km from centre). Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Interlaken's best stretch is July and August at 23-24°C, though those are also its wettest summer months. September holds 18°C with only 38mm, making it the driest of the warm months and the easier time to walk.

Lyon runs warmer over the same summer, 26-28°C, and keeps 23°C into early autumn. Its autumn is the wetter one, peaking at 101mm in October, so its best window sits earlier, from June, when the days are already warm.

Getting there

Flying fromInterlakenLyon
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
€110-163
ZRH · 100 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
€110-133
ZRH · 100 km
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 15 m
€163-196
ZRH · 100 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 25 m
€234-276
ZRH · 100 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 40 m
€188-233
ZRH · 100 km
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 40 m
€114-151
ZRH · 100 km
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
MadridMAD
2 h 5 m
€158-220
1 stop
ZRH · 100 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 15 m
€232-366
1 stop
ZRH · 100 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 5 m
€606-782
1 stop
ZRH · 100 km
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 10 m
€710-815
1 stop
MXP · 135 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 111 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

MeasureInterlakenLyon
Official languageFrench, German, Italian, RomanshFrench
CurrencySwiss Franc (CHF)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCJ230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation571 m160 m
Main airportZürich Airport (ZRH)100 km from centre181 non-stop destinationsLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureInterlakenLyon
City population6,123519,127
People per km²1,42410,838
Museums within 10 km342
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km22
Distinct cuisines in the centre22148

Where else could you go?

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