Tourism plays an important role in the economies of the world. In recent years, the impacts of tourism including other alternative forms and their potential to enhance the lives of impoverished communities have been analyzed. In many parts of Africa, the number of local communities seeking involvement in tourism ventures has soared in the past decade. The host communities’ important role in tourism management must be recognized, and their participation in decision-making must be ensured at all levels. A cogent concern, from a development perspective, is that many such ventures have progressed with scant regard for the changes they may provoke in gender roles, gender relations and access to resources. It is also believed that a focus on sustainability ensures a concern with examining not only the pros of but also what is going wrong, has gone wrong, and can go wrong as a result of selected development paths. Such a focus reminds us to monitor and evaluate the impacts of development policy on the resource base that will sustain future well-being, not necessarily in hundreds of years in the future, but in the next few decades. This paper highlights tourism impacts on host communities in two coastal zones in Kenya and Zanzibar from a cultural heritage point of view and concerns regarding sustainable development in the two areas.