VacationSelector

Inverness or York?

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

Your match

Inverness
25
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

York
✓ Best match
41
match

Wins on good for families 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 Inverness if you want a small city with the coast in reach and cool summers topping out at 19°C, and if a short list of places to eat and drink is no obstacle.

Choose York if you want museums and heritage, a much wider choice of kitchens, somewhere to go afterwards, attractions and theme parks for children, and slightly warmer summers reaching 21°C.

Scoreboard

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

InvernessYork
Beaches & swimming. Inverness leads by 28 points.28
InvernessYork
Score280
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km12
Coast distance1 km50 km
Water distance1 km—
Places to eat. York leads by 33 points.33
InvernessYork
Score2154
Restaurants within 2 km of centre114361
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1131
Museums & heritage. York leads by 26 points.26
InvernessYork
Score2046
Museums within 10 km618
Museums within 2 km of centre516
Share of museums within 2 km %8389
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. York leads by 28 points.28
InvernessYork
Score1543
Drinking venues within 4 km113450
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre98353
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8778
Nightclubs within 4 km414
Nature & day trips. York leads by 24 points.24
InvernessYork
Score933
Protected land share 50 km %1217
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1116
Land share of disc %8895
Park area within 2 km3 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. York leads by 43 points.43
InvernessYork
Score043
Tourist attractions within 2 km313
Park area within 2 km3 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km03
Sights concentration. York leads by 15 points.15
InvernessYork
Score2439
Notable places within 2 km1637
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Inverness and York are level on 54.
InvernessYork
Score5454
Price level global84.984.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. York leads by 4 points.4
InvernessYork
Score5256
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.9 °C6.7 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 72 mm39 mm to 66 mm
Dry months11
0255075100

Where they differ

Inverness is the one with a stretch of coast in play: it has 1 beach nearby and sea reaching 14°C in August, though York has 2 beaches within reach too.

York leads almost everywhere else. It has about three times as many restaurants near the centre, and a similar multiple on places to drink and on nightclubs, most of them walkable. For families it has many times more park space and attractions near the centre, plus 3 theme parks within reach where Inverness has none.

Where they are alike

Both sit in the same narrow band of weather: winters with highs near 7°C, summers that stop at 19-21°C, and one month each with 40mm of rain or less. Neither offers a long warm season.

They are also alike in shape. Each keeps its notable places within walking distance of one centre, York with about twice as many as Inverness, and neither is a swimming destination: no month of sea at 21°C or more.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: York. It has many times more park space and more attractions near the centre than Inverness, plus 3 theme parks within reach, where Inverness has none.

Here for museums and old streets: York again, with about three times as many museums as Inverness and 2 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, all from a walkable centre.

Wanting coast and a quieter scale: Inverness, a city of 47,400, where the sea reaches 14°C in August and there is 1 beach nearby. York still holds the larger share of protected land around it, so this is a choice about the sea, not about countryside generally.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value figures here are a national price level, identical for the two cities by construction, so they say nothing about which costs more. This data carries no daily budget for either Inverness or York, which means no cost comparison between them is possible at all. Price your trip separately, whichever you choose.

The best-ranked months are also among the wettest: August in Inverness brings its warmest sea, 14°C, and also 67mm of rain. A beach nearby does not mean beach weather either, since neither city has a month of sea at 21°C or more.

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
Inverness
7
7
9
12
15
17
19
19
16
13
9
7
York
7
8
10
13
16
19
21
20
18
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Inverness
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
York
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Inverness
50
44
40
42
51
61
60
67
67
72
57
54
York
53
44
39
48
43
61
56
65
58
66
62
60
Daylight, hours per day
Inverness
7
9
12
14
17
18
17
15
13
10
8
7
York
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Inverness
2
2
4
5
6
5
5
4
4
3
2
1
York
2
3
4
5
6
5
6
5
4
3
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Inverness: 1991-2020 normals, Kinloss (43.4 km from centre). York: 1991-2020 normals, Leeming (47.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Inverness is at its best in July and August, when highs reach 19°C and the sea is at its warmest, 14°C. Summer rain runs 60-67mm a month, so spring is the drier stretch if walking matters more than warmth.

York's good window is broader and warmer, peaking in July at 21°C, with May the driest of its usable months at 43mm. Both turn wet in October, above 60mm, which is the month to avoid in either.

Getting there

Flying fromInvernessYork
MalagaAGP
3 h 20 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
PalmaPMI
3 h 5 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 40 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
4 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
GenevaGVA
2 h 15 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
AlicanteALC
3 h 10 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
ReusREU
2 h 45 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
FaroFAO
3 h 20 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
KrakowKRK
2 h 35 m
no fares
ABZ · 126 km
2 h 25 m
no fares
LBA · 39 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 30 m
€61-96
INV · 12 km
55 m
no fares
MAN · 104 km
DublinDUB
1 h 15 m
no fares
INV · 12 km
1 h 0 m
no fares
LBA · 39 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

MeasureInvernessYork
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112 or 999
Elevation7 m25 m
Main airportInverness Airport (INV)12 km from centre13 non-stop destinationsLeeds Bradford Airport (LBA)39 km from centre73 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days8 days

By the numbers

MeasureInvernessYork
City population47,380208,400
People per km²2,289766
Museums within 10 km324
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre1554
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone–

Where else could you go?

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