Measuring the sustainability performance of the tourism sector

•Sustainable tourism means balancing the social, competitive and economic dimensions.•Introducing a system of indicators for measuring the sustainability performance•Investigating sustainability performance through three levels and different dimensions•Many studies have not considered how social, economic or environmental indicators integrate and relate to each other.•A “multi level-dimension” indicator system for measuring performance sustainability is proposed.

To measure tourism sustainability requires a knowledge of the complexity of tourism systems and the specifics of any given location. However most research, although focusing on social, economic or environmental indicators but have not considered how they integrate and relate to each other. This paper proposes a framework for the identification of variables based on three levels (the community, the tourist destination and the individual organisations) and different dimensions (social, competitive and economic) that are better oriented to the behaviour of key actors and the achievement of stakeholder consensus.