VacationSelector

New York or Ottawa?

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

Your match

New York
✓ Best match
66
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nightlife with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on value for money 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.

New YorkOttawa
Beaches & swimming. New York leads by 64 points.64
New YorkOttawa
Score640
Swim season months30
Beaches 10 km179
Coast distance1 km423 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. New York leads by 31 points.31
New YorkOttawa
Score9564
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6,032684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3834
Museums & heritage. New York leads by 28 points.28
New YorkOttawa
Score6032
Museums within 10 km11915
Museums within 2 km of centre318
Share of museums within 2 km %2653
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. New York leads by 45 points.45
New YorkOttawa
Score8944
Drinking venues within 4 km4,159432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre2,015303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %4870
Nightclubs within 4 km19235
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 2 points.2
New YorkOttawa
Score3941
Protected land share 50 km %48
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %69100
Park area within 2 km134 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. New York leads by 26 points.26
New YorkOttawa
Score7246
Tourist attractions within 2 km3711
Park area within 2 km134 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km71
Sights concentration. New York leads by 24 points.24
New YorkOttawa
Score7450
Notable places within 2 km26871
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ottawa leads by 11 points.11
New YorkOttawa
Score4354
Price level global10084
Daily budget
Year-round weather. New York leads by 5 points.5
New YorkOttawa
Score5853
Monthly daytime high4.5 °C to 30.1 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall74 mm to 112 mm53 mm to 94 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
New York
5
6
10
16
22
27
30
29
25
19
13
7
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
New York
6
4
5
8
13
18
22
23
21
17
13
9
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
New York
83
74
102
97
91
103
107
112
98
97
80
104
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
New York
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. New York: 1991-2020 normals, LaGuardia Airport (12.9 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromNew YorkOttawa
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 20 m
€206-234
LGA · 13 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
1 h 15 m
€229-272
LGA · 13 km
50 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
2 h 5 m
€236-237
LGA · 13 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
CancunCUN
3 h 35 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
4 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
OrlandoMCO, SFB, ORL
2 h 30 m
€207-260
LGA · 13 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
7 h 10 m
€459-498
JFK · 21 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
Fort LauderdaleFLL, FXE
2 h 40 m
€175-259
LGA · 13 km
3 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
1 h 5 m
€203-258
LGA · 13 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
BostonBOS, PSM
1 h 0 m
€193-222
JFK · 21 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
Punta CanaPUJ
3 h 35 m
no fares
JFK · 21 km
4 h 15 m
no fares
YOW · 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

MeasureNew YorkOttawa
Official languageFrench, English
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation25 m70 m
Main airportJohn F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)21 km from centre188 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureNew YorkOttawa
City population8,804,1901,017,449
People per km²7,256366
Museums within 10 km15720
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre13262
Swim season, months above 21 °C3 months

Where else could you go?

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