Purpose - Tourism systems have been considered more and more in the light of complexity and chaos theories. Most of the work done in this area has highlighted the reasons for and the issues regarding this approach. A steadily growing strand of the recent literature uses the theories to overcome the problems of a reductionist and mechanistic view that is considered unable to provide a full understanding of the structural and dynamic characteristics of tourism systems, and specifically of tourism destinations. This paper seeks to continue this approach and to provide a series of quantitative methods to assess the dynamics of non-linear complex tourism systems.