Despite the new-found demand for sustainable tourism monitoring, there are as yet few examples of monitoring in practice. The tourism industry is no newcomer to monitoring, having measured its performance for many years using conventional tourism indicators such as arrival numbers, length of stay and tourist expenditure. However, the shift from using conventional indicators to indicators of sustainable tourism is a recent one. It was only in the second half of the 1990s that an increasing number of tourism researchers began to voice the need for the development of more comprehensive sustainable tourism indicators that make the important connection between tourism and the wider economic, environmental
and social processes in the destination (Mowforth and Munt, 1998; Weaver, 1998; Swarbrooke,1999;Sirakaya et al., 2001).