Sustainability reporting has become increasingly prominent in business, accounting, and regulatory debates, yet its development among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remains uneven, particularly in the tourism sector. This article examines the current scientific evidence on sustainability reporting in tourism SMEs from an accounting perspective and identifies the main conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges associated with its development, with particular attention to implications for contexts such as Cartagena de Indias. The study adopts a structured literature review with a critical analytical orientation. An initial open-ended exploratory search was followed by a focused review of studies published mainly between 2010 and 2026, using Consensus as the primary search support tool. The review considered literature addressing sustainability reporting, accounting-related approaches, SMEs, tourism, and selected regional evidence from Latin America. The findings indicate that sustainability reporting in tourism SMEs remains an emerging and fragmented field. Many tourism SMEs appear to engage in sustainability-related practices, but these actions are rarely translated into structured, comparable, and accounting-oriented reporting systems (Font et al., 2016; Girella et al., 2019; Silveira et al., 2021). The literature points to persistent barriers, including financial constraints, limited technical expertise, weak data systems, low regulatory pressure, and the limited proportionality of dominant reporting frameworks (O’Reilly et al., 2024; Setyaningsih et al., 2024; Steidle et al., 2025). From an accounting perspective, reporting in SMEs is studied mainly as a disclosure and measurement practice, an internal organizational process linked to accounting and control systems, and a professional domain in which accountants and advisory firms play a facilitating role (Rossi & Luque-Vílchez, 2020; Ortiz et al., 2023; Schaltegger et al., 2022). The article concludes that sustainability reporting in tourism SMEs should be understood as an emerging accounting and accountability field whose development depends on proportional reporting tools, stronger professional support, and more context-sensitive research. The limited evidence available for Latin America reinforces the relevance of destinations such as Cartagena de Indias as important settings for future empirical and practical advances (Bunclark & Barcellos-Paula, 2021; Correa-García et al., 2020; Da Porciúncula & Andreoli, 2023).