VacationSelector

Maastricht or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Maastricht
41
match

Has no clear advantage with the weighting you have chosen.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
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.

MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 100 points.100
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score0100
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km661
Coast distance118 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Rio de Janeiro leads by 6 points.6
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score4854
Restaurants within 2 km of centre338804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2216
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 16 points.16
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score5369
Museums within 10 km23110
Museums within 2 km of centre1351
Share of museums within 2 km %5746
Unesco sites within 50 km53
Nightlife. Rio de Janeiro leads by 27 points.27
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score3057
Drinking venues within 4 km223818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre182509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8262
Nightclubs within 4 km1350
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 25 points.25
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score3762
Protected land share 50 km %1921
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1117
Land share of disc %10057
Park area within 2 km33 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Rio de Janeiro leads by 13 points.13
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score4659
Tourist attractions within 2 km1530
Park area within 2 km33 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km51
Sights concentration. Rio de Janeiro leads by 20 points.20
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score3656
Notable places within 2 km3298
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 23 points.23
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score5881
Price level global79.246.1
Daily budget€181
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 26 points.26
MaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Score5985
Monthly daytime high5.7 °C to 23.8 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall41 mm to 84 mm42 mm to 232 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
Maastricht
6
7
11
15
19
22
24
24
20
15
10
6
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Maastricht
No coastline within reach
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Maastricht
64
58
55
41
58
69
73
84
58
65
62
74
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Maastricht
9
10
12
14
16
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Maastricht
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Rio de Janeiro
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Maastricht: 1991-2020 normals, Maastricht Airport Zuid Limburg (10 km from centre). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMaastrichtRio de Janeiro
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
9 h 45 m
€609-699
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
1 h 5 m
€113-134
GIG · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 10 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
2 h 5 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
LisbonLIS
2 h 45 m
no fares
EIN · 70 km
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
7 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
PortoOPO
2 h 30 m
no fares
MST · 9 km
10 h 0 m
€827-915
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 0 m
€138-162
2 stops
BRU · 85 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 85 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 85 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 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

MeasureMaastrichtRio de Janeiro
Official languageDutchPortuguese
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112 or 911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation49 m31 m
Main airportMaastricht Aachen Airport (MST)9 km from centre5 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureMaastrichtRio de Janeiro
City population120,2276,211,223
People per km²2,0004,930
Museums within 10 km2170
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km53
Distinct cuisines in the centre3327
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Maastricht or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. 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.