Within the recent debate about the needs for improving Ecological Footprint (EF) method, Kitzes and
colleagues highlighted the necessity of standardised and detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies
to support the calculation of specific impacts accounted in EF. As EF has been identified as a useful
method for the evaluation of sustainability of tourism activities, this article presents a comparative study
about sustainability evaluation of tourism activities, including LCA of a holiday and a hotel structure.
The methodology for a joint use of the two methods was expected to provide more robust and detailed
sustainability assessment as LCA is more comprehensive in terms of coverage of impact categories but
disregard the carrying capacity of the system/limit of resource assessed by EF. The methodology was
applied to two case studies in Northern Italy. The case studies showed that there is a correlation between
the results of the two assessments, due to the relevance of energy and fossil fuel consumption as main
drivers of impact.