In the field of tourism impacts research it is often assumed that certain characteristics of tourism are related to the nature and extent of tourism impacts on the destination’s community well-being. However, a standard set of measures for tourism that allows comparison between destinations and facilitates the establishment of causal relationships between specific characteristics of tourism and associated impacts has not yet been established. Previously, Faulkner and Tideswell [Faulkner, B., & Tideswell, C. (1997). A Framework for Monitoring Community Impacts of Tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 5(1), 3 - 28] introduced a framework for monitoring social impacts of tourism, which identifies four facets of tourism in a destination: stage of tourism development, visitor-resident contact, types of visitors, and seasonality. A set of objective measures for those facets has been devised and tested on three tropical Australian regional communities. This paper reports on the process of developing this objective measures framework and collecting and analysing the available data. The study found that the devised framework allows for the identification of differences in tourism development at a regional destination level and classification of tourism destinations according to the type and degree of tourism development. The paper concludes by outlining future directions for research into the impacts of tourism.