From the examination of the 12 case studies mentioned above (Table 1), a number of issues are identified and discussed, as summarised in Table 2: (1) The indicators (issues, problems, and concerns) for STD vary from one tourist destination to another. (2) Most judgments about sustainability are arrived at by the authors themselves without the participation of stakeholders. (3) Generally only a small number of indicators are examined to arrive at the authors’ conclusions regarding the sustainability of given tourist destinations. (4) Indicator selection procedures are generally not presented. (5) Data-gathering procedures are also not presented, or not made clear in the case studies. (6) Scaling (quantification) of sustainability maintained by tourist destinations is not attempted in the case studies. Ideally, when the term sustainable in terms of system quality is mentioned, the state of system quality must be presented clearly (e.g. 80 out of health of 100% or 50 out of 100%). (7) None of the authors demonstrate gradations (sectors or bands of scaling) of sustainability. All authors, unconsciously and automatically, use two categories (sustainable and unsustainable) to define sustainability. However, the modes of sustainability may vary, as suggested by IUCN (1995, 1997) and
Prescott-Allen (1997). (8) SAMs are not employed in the case studies. One of the policy objectives of STD is to present the current or past trends of the community’s quality situation clearly to the general public andother stakeholders. For this purpose, documents or written statements, which nobody understands except certain experts, are not appropriate. (9) Future scenarios of sustainability are not presented. In order to examine the trends of tourism sustainability in the community in a limited period (e.g. 5–10 years), the assessment requires monitoring the movement of sustainability.