Tourism planning in protected areas (PAs) entails addressing two partly competing and overlapping goals: preserving heritage and providing access. Resolving potential conflicts between these two goals is particularly challenging at the intersection of natural heritage and tourism development. Not only are competing goals involved, but professionals such as PAs managers, community development planners, tourism operators, marketing specialists, and paradigms of management often conflict. Even though PAs are increasingly a popular strategy for managing biodiversity conservation, their contribution to livelihoods improvement and sustainable development remains contested. Some case studies show that levels of resources extraction are not sustainable. Promoting alternative livelihoods options within and around PAs through tourism is an obvious management opportunity to reduce pressure on PAs, but such attempts have mixed results. As an intervention management tool, the introduction of community wildlife-based tourism within and around PAs is currently one of the future growth areas, particularly as leisure time, mobility, environmental awareness, and the desire to visit pristine and relatively unspoiled landscape hosted by PAs increase. For community wildlife-based tourism to be an effective conservation tool, increased understanding of its socio-ecological implications is required. When tourism is used to strengthen conservation, it becomes an essential component of the processes needed to implement conventions on biodiversity and other agreements concerning cultural heritage and sustainable development.Tourism can therefore assist with the urgent need to build networks of PAs.