In general, sustainable development is a concept that promotes the protection of resources in the future. The issues of sustainable development has been discussed and promoted worldwide in various fields including tourism. The elements of sustainable have been enforced to be considered in every development stage. Meanwhile, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) has promoted the application of sustainable indicator since the early 1990s as essential instruments for policy-making, planning and management processes at destinations. Despite growing number of revenue to local community and business operators, tourism brings other challenges towards the environmental protection. Each destination has limited resources that can be consumed by tourism activities. For example, the increased numbers of tourists will have negative consequences in its natural resources in which pressure from tourism activities, would lead to damage on physical and ecological features. As a result, various actions have been taken by the respective authorities to solve the problem by identifying various tools to measure the sustainability such as; Impact Assessment, Environmental Auditing (EA), Carrying Capacity (CC), Sustainable Tourism Benchmarking Tool (STBT), Certification and Eco-Labeling, and others. However, are those methods suitable for every type of tourism development? Recognizing the importance of sustainable elements in tourism development, this paper aims to review on previous studies or practices related with sustainable tourism. The review would comprise the framework, assessment approaches, criteria, indicator and others. However, there are arguments concerning on the assessment methods, which present more on theoretical rather than practical suitability which will be discussed further. On the other hand, the discussion also will be focused on the approaches that has been developed or practiced by few countries including Malaysia. It is perhaps through the discussions, we are able to have a better understanding of the complexities of approaches in measuring the sustainability in tourism development
