VacationSelector

Melbourne or Vancouver?

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

Your match

Melbourne
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on year-round weather and nightlife with your weighting.

Vancouver
57
match

Wins on nature & day trips and beaches & swimming 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.

MelbourneVancouver
Beaches & swimming. Vancouver leads by 5 points.5
MelbourneVancouver
Score5560
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km19109
Coast distance4 km1 km
Water distance4 km1 km
Places to eat. Melbourne leads by 1 points.1
MelbourneVancouver
Score7574
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,8881,330
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2935
Museums & heritage. Melbourne leads by 15 points.15
MelbourneVancouver
Score4934
Museums within 10 km4227
Museums within 2 km of centre2415
Share of museums within 2 km %5756
Unesco sites within 50 km10
Nightlife. Melbourne leads by 17 points.17
MelbourneVancouver
Score7457
Drinking venues within 4 km1,921848
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,200602
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6271
Nightclubs within 4 km12444
Nature & day trips. Vancouver leads by 34 points.34
MelbourneVancouver
Score4377
Protected land share 50 km %619
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8160
Park area within 2 km166 hectares103 hectares
Good for families. Melbourne leads by 7 points.7
MelbourneVancouver
Score6053
Tourist attractions within 2 km2615
Park area within 2 km166 hectares103 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km13
Sights concentration. Melbourne leads by 9 points.9
MelbourneVancouver
Score5748
Notable places within 2 km10363
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Vancouver leads by 4 points.4
MelbourneVancouver
Score5054
Price level global90.284
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Melbourne leads by 23 points.23
MelbourneVancouver
Score7653
Monthly daytime high13.6 °C to 26.8 °C7.3 °C to 23 °C
Monthly rainfall45 mm to 69 mm42 mm to 245 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
Melbourne
27
27
24
20
17
14
14
15
17
20
22
25
Vancouver
7
8
11
14
18
20
23
23
19
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Melbourne
20
21
20
18
15
13
12
11
12
14
17
19
Vancouver
7
7
8
10
12
14
16
16
14
11
9
8
Rainfall, mm
Melbourne
46
48
45
58
50
58
46
52
60
56
69
65
Vancouver
237
121
164
114
73
65
42
49
71
155
245
196
Daylight, hours per day
Melbourne
15
14
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
Vancouver
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Melbourne
9
7
7
6
5
4
4
6
6
7
7
9
Vancouver
2
3
4
6
8
7
10
9
7
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Melbourne: 1991-2020 normals, Latrobe University / Kingsbury (13.1 km from centre). Vancouver: 1991-2020 normals, Vancouver Harbour CS (4.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromMelbourneVancouver
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
15 h 40 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 45 m
€147-217
1 stop
YVR · 9 km
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 15 m
€809-850
1 stop
MEL · 19 km
9 h 35 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
SydneySYD, WSI
1 h 30 m
€119-126
MEL · 19 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
Hong KongHKG
9 h 25 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
12 h 45 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
7 h 45 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
15 h 45 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
BrisbaneBNE
2 h 15 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
14 h 35 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
San FranciscoSFO
15 h 35 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
ManilaMNL
8 h 5 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
13 h 5 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
AucklandAKL
3 h 45 m
€515
MEL · 19 km
14 h 0 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
17 h 55 m
no fares
MEL · 19 km
11 h 55 m
no fares
YVR · 9 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

MeasureMelbourneVancouver
Official languageEnglishFrench, English
CurrencyAustralian Dollar (AUD)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsI230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+10, UTC+11 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number000911
Elevation31 m2 m
Main airportMelbourne Airport (MEL)19 km from centre66 non-stop destinationsVancouver International Airport (YVR)9 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureMelbourneVancouver
City population5,350,705662,248
People per km²5355,759
Museums within 10 km4226
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km10
Distinct cuisines in the centre8685
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Melbourne or Vancouver 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). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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.

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.