Negative effects of overtourism, especially in relation to spatial characteristics of places, are becoming increasingly evident worldwide, including in Croatia. This is the context of renewed interest in tourism carrying capacity assessment as a tool for more effective destination management. The Institute for Tourism and The Institute for Physical Planning of Primorje-Gorski Kotar County initiated a project on revisiting and impoving the methodological framework of tourism carrying capacity piloted on the Crikvenica-Vinodol Riviera. This first phase of the project focused on analysing past approaches, benefits, criticism and implementation of the concept, on selecting a system of indicators from three domains (factual data, local resident perceptions, visitor perceptions), data collection and analysis, with the final stage being the recogtnition of 'bottlenecks' to tourism development which call for management solutions.