VacationSelector

Lyon or Rovaniemi?

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 places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rovaniemi
23
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

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.

LyonRovaniemi
Beaches & swimming. Lyon and Rovaniemi are level on 0.
LyonRovaniemi
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2613
Coast distance253 km99 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Lyon leads by 58 points.58
LyonRovaniemi
Score7921
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,69180
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4014
Museums & heritage. Lyon leads by 35 points.35
LyonRovaniemi
Score5520
Museums within 10 km538
Museums within 2 km of centre257
Share of museums within 2 km %4788
Unesco sites within 50 km20
Nightlife. Lyon leads by 54 points.54
LyonRovaniemi
Score584
Drinking venues within 4 km86652
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre61142
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7181
Nightclubs within 4 km473
Nature & day trips. Lyon leads by 17 points.17
LyonRovaniemi
Score3316
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %60
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km120 hectares25 hectares
Good for families. Lyon leads by 38 points.38
LyonRovaniemi
Score5921
Tourist attractions within 2 km252
Park area within 2 km120 hectares25 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Lyon leads by 29 points.29
LyonRovaniemi
Score5425
Notable places within 2 km8617
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Lyon leads by 6 points.6
LyonRovaniemi
Score6256
Price level global73.781.6
Daily budget€160€184
Year-round weather. Lyon leads by 21 points.21
LyonRovaniemi
Score6443
Monthly daytime high7 °C to 28 °C-7.9 °C to 20.9 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 101 mm30 mm to 75 mm
Dry months05
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
Rovaniemi
-8
-6
-1
5
13
18
21
18
13
4
0
-4
Rainfall, mm
Lyon
51
43
50
68
82
73
66
68
84
101
88
54
Rovaniemi
37
32
33
30
37
69
75
63
50
50
48
41
Daylight, hours per day
Lyon
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Rovaniemi
4
8
12
15
20
24
22
17
13
10
6
3
Sunshine, hours per day
Lyon
2
3
6
6
7
9
9
8
6
4
3
2
Rovaniemi
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). Rovaniemi: 2008-2020 (rainfall 1991-2020) normals, Rovaniemi Rautatieasema / Kuusela (0.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromLyonRovaniemi
HelsinkiHEL
3 h 0 m
no fares
GVA · 111 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 35 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 10 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
DublinDUB
2 h 5 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
3 h 20 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 0 m
€167-217
LYS · 20 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 30 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
3 h 0 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 20 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 15 m
no fares
LYS · 20 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 20 m
€195-211
2 stops
LYS · 20 km
3 h 5 m
no fares
RVN · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
4 h 5 m
no fares
GNB · 59 km
5 h 15 m
no fares
RVN · 8 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

MeasureLyonRovaniemi
Official languageFrenchFinnish, Swedish
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation160 m88 m
Main airportLyon Saint-Exupéry Airport (LYS)20 km from centre139 non-stop destinationsRovaniemi Airport (RVN)8 km from centre43 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureLyonRovaniemi
City population519,12765,329
People per km²10,8389
Museums within 10 km426
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km20
Distinct cuisines in the centre14816

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Lyon or Rovaniemi 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. 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.