Making tourism sustainable involves raising awareness and mobilizing the public sector decision-makers, several organizations and businesses and the general public to work together, aligning with environmental, social and economic policies with rationality and ethics, leading to a better behaviour and practices of the tourist consumers, like a demand of social and political responsibility of our days. This article as a reflective approach on tourism activity, aims to promote correlations of thought that can contribute to the discussion of sustainability in production and consumption in tourism destinations. Methodologically we resort to direct observation, by connecting events, facts and concepts, with a research determined by a of critical realism, finding that the trajectories of economic growth and consumption are similar in tourism activities, generating negative impacts and unsustainability, signalling the need of a reflection on the sustainability indicators for changes in the way it is produced and consumed in the tourist phenomenon, like as strong inducers in the reputation and attractiveness of tourism destinations, for all already developed or consolidated, as well as for those in the exploration or involvement stage, in their tourist life cycle.