VacationSelector

Lyon or New Orleans?

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 value for money and places to eat with your weighting.

New Orleans
47
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather 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.

LyonNew Orleans
Beaches & swimming. New Orleans leads by 39 points.39
LyonNew Orleans
Score039
Swim season months07
Beaches 10 km263
Coast distance253 km21 km
Water distance17 km
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 18 points.18
LyonNew Orleans
Score7961
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,691803
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4025
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 10 points.10
LyonNew Orleans
Score5545
Museums within 10 km5342
Museums within 2 km of centre2530
Share of museums within 2 km %4771
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 4 points.4
LyonNew Orleans
Score5854
Drinking venues within 4 km866704
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre611495
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7170
Nightclubs within 4 km4741
Nature & day trips. Lyon leads by 8 points.8
LyonNew Orleans
Score3325
Protected land share 50 km %64
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %10089
Park area within 2 km120 hectares43 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 13 points.13
LyonNew Orleans
Score5946
Tourist attractions within 2 km2522
Park area within 2 km120 hectares43 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 14 points.14
LyonNew Orleans
Score5440
Notable places within 2 km8640
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 19 points.19
LyonNew Orleans
Score6243
Price level global73.7100
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. New Orleans leads by 4 points.4
LyonNew Orleans
Score6468
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C17.1 °C to 33 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm94 mm to 194 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
New Orleans
17
19
23
26
30
32
33
33
31
27
22
18
Sea temperature, °C
Lyon
No coastline within reach
New Orleans
14
15
18
22
25
29
30
30
28
24
20
16
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
New Orleans
132
104
111
132
143
194
169
180
128
94
98
123
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
New Orleans
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
12
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
New Orleans
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Lyon: 1991-2020 normals, Lyon / Bron (10.6 km from centre). New Orleans: 1991-2020 normals, New Orleans Airport (2.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLyonNew Orleans
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
8 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
2 h 55 m
€254-325
1 stop
MSY · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
9 h 25 m
no fares
MSY · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
8 h 25 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
2 h 30 m
no fares
MSY · 18 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

MeasureLyonNew Orleans
Official languageFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-6, UTC-5 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation160 m-2 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsLouis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY)18 km from centre50 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonNew Orleans
City population519,127383,997
People per km²10,838423
Museums within 10 km4216
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre14839
Swim season, months above 21 °C7 months

Where else could you go?

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