There is substantial literature on the impacts of tourism on culture, both positive and negative, however, there are relatively few articles that explore the relationship between cultural capital and sustainable tourism. This paper will report on an action research project aimed at identifying and applying new approaches to using tourism effectively as a strategy for sustainable development in destination communities. The research reported in this paper adopted a community capitals approach to sustainable destination development and explored the links between features of tourism development and impacts on the cultural capital available to destination communities. Flora’s (2004) Community Capitals Framework (CCF) offers a way to analyse community and economic development efforts from a systems perspective by identifying the assets in each capital (stock), the types of capital invested (flow), the interaction among the capitals, and the resulting impacts across capitals. The model incorporates seven forms of capital financial, human, built, natural, cultural, political and social.