VacationSelector

Marseille or San Diego?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 1 point apart

Marseille
57
match

Wins on value for money and sights concentration with your weighting.

San Diego
58
match

Wins on good for families 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.

MarseilleSan Diego
Beaches & swimming. Marseille leads by 4 points.4
MarseilleSan Diego
Score6763
Swim season months21
Beaches 10 km6442
Coast distance0 km1 km
Water distance0 km1 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 12 points.12
MarseilleSan Diego
Score7563
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,320823
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3927
Museums & heritage. Marseille leads by 6 points.6
MarseilleSan Diego
Score5044
Museums within 10 km3359
Museums within 2 km of centre2330
Share of museums within 2 km %7051
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. San Diego leads by 2 points.2
MarseilleSan Diego
Score4850
Drinking venues within 4 km544615
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre454408
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8366
Nightclubs within 4 km3031
Nature & day trips. San Diego leads by 18 points.18
MarseilleSan Diego
Score3755
Protected land share 50 km %156
Landscape blanket share 50 km %130
Land share of disc %5652
Park area within 2 km25 hectares308 hectares
Good for families. San Diego leads by 31 points.31
MarseilleSan Diego
Score4475
Tourist attractions within 2 km1740
Park area within 2 km25 hectares308 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km43
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 18 points.18
MarseilleSan Diego
Score5840
Notable places within 2 km11140
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Marseille leads by 19 points.19
MarseilleSan Diego
Score6243
Price level global73.7100
Daily budget€160
Year-round weather. San Diego leads by 13 points.13
MarseilleSan Diego
Score7588
Monthly daytime high11.8 °C to 30.7 °C18.6 °C to 25 °C
Monthly rainfall11 mm to 82 mm0 mm to 56 mm
Dry months69
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
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
San Diego
19
19
19
20
21
22
24
25
25
23
21
19
Sea temperature, °C
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
San Diego
15
15
16
16
17
19
20
21
21
19
18
16
Rainfall, mm
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
San Diego
50
56
37
17
7
1
2
0
3
13
20
42
Daylight, hours per day
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
San Diego
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Marseille
5
6
8
8
10
11
12
11
9
6
5
4
San Diego
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre). San Diego: 1991-2020 normals, San Diego International Airport (2.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMarseilleSan Diego
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
11 h 0 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
MunichMUC
1 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
12 h 5 m
no fares
SAN · 3 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
SAN · 3 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 2026-09, 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

MeasureMarseilleSan Diego
Official languageFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation0 m129 m
Main airportMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsSan Diego International Airport (SAN)3 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureMarseilleSan Diego
City population886,0401,386,932
People per km²3,6831,438
Museums within 10 km2726
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre9344
Swim season, months above 21 °C2 months1 month

Where else could you go?

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