Tourism Sustainability Methodologies: A Critical Assessment Kyriaki Glyptou Department of Business Administration University of the Aegean Chios, Greece k.glyptou@fme.aegean.gr John A. Paravantis Department of International & European Studies University of Piraeus Piraeus, Greece jparav@unipi.gr Andreas Papatheodorou Department of Business Administration University of the Aegean Chios, Greece a.papatheodorou@aegean.gr Ioannis Spilanis Department of Environment University of the Aegean Mytilene, Greece ispil@aegean.gr Abstract— In an era of economic crisis and serious environmental constraints, the transition to sustainability enters dynamically the debate over long-term preservation and welfare at a systemic level. Tourism is a resource- (capital, human and natural) demanding sector; this paper explores the variety and diversity of methodological approaches and tools employed in the evaluation of tourism, and their potential to support sustainability-oriented assessments and practices. Ranging from traditional economics-oriented frameworks to assessments of impact and ecological footprint, this paper discusses the prevailing assessment frameworks of specific tourism dimensions heading towards the integrative approaches for Tourism Sustainability Assessment. The review highlights that despite the widespread acceptance of the concept and the international consensus on the importance of its operationalization, the transition towards tourism sustainability remains still a complicated and rather problematic endeavour. Keywords—Tourism, Sustainability Assessment, Operationalization, Evaluation Frameworks, Review. I. INTRODUCTION The developmental pattern of Ssustainability has been promoted over the last two decades, by the academic [1-2] and institutional community [3-5] as a high priority objective and as a prerequisite for any effective planning and policy actions of the tourism sector and its hosting destination. Despite the numerous theoretical approaches on the conceptualization and measurement of the notion, this paper suggests that little progress has been made towards its actual operationalization. The difficulty lies primarily in the absence of explicit quantitative targets and benchmarks of tourism sustainability as well as the inability to develop concrete, generalized and applicable guidelines towards its achievement and measurement. In an effort to contribute towards the identification of the occasional discrepancies between tourism assessment tools and sustainability assessment, the paper provides an overview of existing methodologies and frameworks; highlights their strengths and weaknesses; and identifies major pitfalls towards the actual operationalization of tourism sustainability. The paper is structured in four sections. The first three summarize the methodologies and tools focusing on the assessment of individual dimensions of the tourism sector: economic, social and environmental. The last section presents all integrative methodologies and tools with respect to the evaluation of Tourism Sustainability. The paper concludes with a number of overall remarks on the findings of the presented review highlighting potential avenues for the concepts’ operationalization. II. LITERATURE REVIEW ECONOMIC DIMENSION OF TOURISM Tourism is primarily regarded as a production sector by the dominant literature, thus evaluated in terms of its contribution and impact through a pure economics-oriented perspective [6- 8]. In contrast to the rest of the production sectors composing the System of National Accounts (SNAs), tourism is analyzed from the demand side implying that the required tourism consumption volume of goods and services (tourism demand) determines the size and dynamics of the production and resource units employed in the hosting economy (tourism supply) [7, 9-10]. In this context, supply is expected to be fully elastic and dependent on the demand (in terms of the quantity produced), notwithstanding the restricted availability and renewal capacity of the supporting natural resources. This approach is deeply rooted into the shortcomings of setting explicit boundaries to the tourism phenomenon as economic activity due to the great difficulty in: (a) identifying the numerous and multilevel (direct, indirect, induced and catalytic) interconnections of tourism with the rest of the production sectors, but mainly in (b) distinguishing between the end-user (tourist or not) of a tourism-characteristic product. As a result, tourism economics-oriented approaches are subject to reliability constraints regarding the complete extent of sectors’ contribution and production line, with many