Tourism is a large and complex system which, in order to achieve a long term success, needs to implement the sustainability principles in the process of its planning and development. Sustainable tourism development must ensure optimal results in the long run, enabling the future generations to achieve at least the same results and living conditions as the present ones. Achieving sustainable tourism is a continuous process and it requires constant monitoring of impacts, introducing the necessary preventive and corrective measures whenever necessary and requires the informed participation of all relevant stakeholders and strong political leadership. To be able to cope with the issue of sustainable tourism development, one must understand the importance of its problems which previous generations and previous researchers have dealt with. Based on that knowledge, it became evident that sustainable tourism development needed to be measured and that the assumption for that process was to determine upon which indicators those measures could be taken. In terms of defining the indicators crucial for measuring sustainability of tourism development numerous factors need to be taken into account, but above all the approval of local authorities or governments is crucial. Sustainable tourism development as a concept arises from its three main criteria – economic, socio-cultural and environmental. Those three criteria should achieve balance in the overall society and they should be carefully implemented in order to generate the desired life quality for local communities. As much as the concept of sustainable tourism development can be considered a logical sequence of modern ways of living or thinking, with the aim to prevent a complete devastation of the existing resources it is necessary to adopt the responsibility for what has been done to the environment, sociocultural interactions and to the economy and in accordance with that develop a strategy for future actions. The main purpose of this research is to analyze the current state of sustainable tourism in Croatia, guidelines for the further development and sustainable tourism in Croatia in the context of EU accession.