About SunFinder

SunFinder answers one question: where will it actually be sunny on your travel dates? We track 395 destinations and score each one from real weather data — a 16-day forecast refreshed twice daily, extended by historical climate records (2015–2024) for trips further out.

Who is behind SunFinder

SunFinder is built in Brussels by Jean-Nicolas Laurent Josi, a bio-engineer who has spent his career on climate and energy data, and far too many winters under Belgian skies. The site started as a personal spreadsheet to answer one question — where will it actually be sunny on the dates I can travel? — and grew into a ranking of 395 destinations refreshed twice a day. No editorial team, no sponsored placements: just the data and one person keeping it honest.

The sun score

Sun score v2: 40% effective sunshine hours, 30% thermal comfort (21–31°C), 20% dry days, 10% calm winds. Climate averages 2015–2024. When you search with specific dates, the score is recomputed over exactly the days of your trip. We never substitute made-up numbers — if we don't have data, we say so.

Effective sunshine (40%). Measured sunshine hours divided by the day's daylight, capped at twelve hours — so a Caribbean December with ten bright hours scores like a Nordic June, and short winter days can't fake a perfect score.

Thermal comfort (30%). Full marks for daily highs between 21 and 31°C, falling away linearly to zero below 14°C or above 36°C — warm enough for the beach, not punishing desert heat.

Dry days (20%). A blend of how much rain falls and how often a day gets more than 1 mm, weighted by how heavy the average rain day is. The blend matters in the tropics: a brief afternoon shower barely dents the score, while an all-day drizzle sinks it. Tropical shower frequency is scored honestly — when recent years brought more rain days to Phuket or the Maldives than the old brochure normals suggest, the score says so rather than massaging it away.

Calm winds (10%). Full marks when the day's strongest gusts stay under 20 km/h — 25 km/h on the coast, where a sea breeze is part of the deal — and zero from 50 km/h: nobody tans in a gale.

Swimmable. Coastal destinations get a swimmable tag whenever the sea surface averages 22°C or more that month. Sea temperatures come from Open-Meteo's marine data, averaged over 2023 to today — shorter than our land records, because that's how far back the marine dataset goes.

Where the data comes from

All weather data comes from Open-Meteo.com: the 16-day forecast API for the near term, and their historical archive (daily records, 2015–2024) for climate averages.

How we make money

Some outbound links (flights, hotels, activities, insurance) are affiliate links — booking through them earns us a commission at no extra cost to you. It never affects rankings: scores come from weather data alone. See the disclaimer for details.