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The paper aims at highlighting the role and importance of tourism statistics in describing tourism sector and, more in general, the evolution of a society. So far, despite WTO recommendations, and the EU regulations on the European statistics on tourism (Reg. 692/2011), there is no standardized Tourism Statistics System (TSS) across countries. Several problems, that impact on the coherence and comparability of data across countries and domains, characterize the production of tourism statistics. This study systematically and critically examines metadata of tourism statistics for a significant group of countries, aiming at highlighting those methodological issues that are afflicting tourism statistics (Masiero, 2016; Lam and McKercher, 2013). The present analysis reveals the implementation of different process designs as well as different data collection modes and different operational definitions for both typical tourism data: data collected from the supply side (“capacity and occupancy dataâ€) and demand side (households survey). Demand side tourism statistics face the operational definition problem of the “usual environmentâ€, that in turn determines the concept of “visitorâ€. Around the world, some countries uses an objective measure of the distance from the place of resident, whereas in European countries this concept is not define yet.