VacationSelector

Lyon or Melbourne?

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

Your match

Lyon
52
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife 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.

LyonMelbourne
Beaches & swimming. Melbourne leads by 55 points.55
LyonMelbourne
Score055
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2619
Coast distance253 km4 km
Water distance—4 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 4 points.4
LyonMelbourne
Score7975
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,6911,888
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4029
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 6 points.6
LyonMelbourne
Score5549
Museums within 10 km5342
Museums within 2 km of centre2524
Share of museums within 2 km %4757
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 16 points.16
LyonMelbourne
Score5874
Drinking venues within 4 km8661,921
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre6111,200
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7162
Nightclubs within 4 km47124
Nature & day trips. Melbourne leads by 10 points.10
LyonMelbourne
Score3343
Protected land share 50 km %66
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %10081
Park area within 2 km120 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 1 points.1
LyonMelbourne
Score5960
Tourist attractions within 2 km2526
Park area within 2 km120 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 3 points.3
LyonMelbourne
Score5457
Notable places within 2 km86103
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 12 points.12
LyonMelbourne
Score6250
Price level global73.790.2
Daily budget€160—
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 12 points.12
LyonMelbourne
Score6476
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C13.6 °C to 26.8 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm45 mm to 69 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
Lyon
7
9
14
17
21
26
28
28
23
18
11
8
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Sea temperature, °C
Lyon
No coastline within reach
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLyonMelbourne
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
14 h 20 m
€856-961
2 stops
MEL · 19 km
DohaDOH
6 h 5 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
14 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
ShanghaiPVG, SHA
11 h 35 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
10 h 5 m
€542-1650
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
10 h 20 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
Abu DhabiAUH
6 h 30 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
14 h 20 m
no fares
MEL · 19 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

MeasureLyonMelbourne
Official languageFrenchEnglish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number112000
Elevation160 m31 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonMelbourne
City population519,1275,350,705
People per km²10,838535
Museums within 10 km4242
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre14886
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lyon or Melbourne 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.