VacationSelector

Lyon or Montreal?

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

Your match

Lyon
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on museums & heritage and year-round weather with your weighting.

Montreal
47
match

Wins on nightlife and 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.

LyonMontreal
Beaches & swimming. Lyon and Montreal are level on 0.
LyonMontreal
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km267
Coast distance253 km276 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 5 points.5
LyonMontreal
Score7974
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,6911,016
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4049
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 18 points.18
LyonMontreal
Score5537
Museums within 10 km5339
Museums within 2 km of centre2519
Share of museums within 2 km %4749
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Montreal leads by 4 points.4
LyonMontreal
Score5862
Drinking venues within 4 km8661,012
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre611493
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7149
Nightclubs within 4 km4774
Nature & day trips. Montreal leads by 3 points.3
LyonMontreal
Score3336
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km120 hectares189 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 9 points.9
LyonMontreal
Score5950
Tourist attractions within 2 km2511
Park area within 2 km120 hectares189 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Montreal leads by 2 points.2
LyonMontreal
Score5456
Notable places within 2 km8698
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 8 points.8
LyonMontreal
Score6254
Price level global73.784
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 14 points.14
LyonMontreal
Score6450
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C-3.5 °C to 26.5 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm69 mm to 121 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
Montreal
-3
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
13
6
-1
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Montreal
84
69
89
121
89
107
98
109
88
100
85
94
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Montreal
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Montreal
3
4
6
6
8
8
9
8
7
4
3
3

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). Montreal: 1991-2020 normals, Montreal McTavish (3.2 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLyonMontreal
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
7 h 10 m
€308-372
YUL · 16 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
6 h 50 m
€447-599
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 20 m
€109-165
LYS · 20 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
NantesNTE
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
1 h 20 m
€231-372
1 stop
YUL · 16 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
7 h 35 m
€591-764
2 stops
YUL · 16 km
PortoOPO
2 h 5 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
BarcelonaBCN
1 h 20 m
€70-92
LYS · 20 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
YUL · 16 km
TunisTUN
1 h 55 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
8 h 40 m
no fares
YUL · 16 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 2026-09 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

MeasureLyonMontreal
Official languageFrenchFrench, English
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation160 m31 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsMontreal / Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport (YUL)16 km from centre164 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonMontreal
City population519,1271,895,211
People per km²10,8383,806
Museums within 10 km4237
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre14897

Where else could you go?

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