This article analyses the use of mixed methods in papers published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism (JOST) over a ten year period, 2005 to 2014. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how and why mixed methods research is being used in the sustainable tourism field. First, a content analysis of the articles shows that the purposes are primarily expansion and development of the results, and less often triangulation or complementarity. Sequential designs are slightly more popular than simultaneous designs, with qualitative research preceding the quantitative element. In the majority of cases, both the quantitative and qualitative methods are equivalent in importance, yet where one is dominant this is usually the quantitative part. Second, we contextualise the content analysis by exemplifying the use of mixed methods with selected papers and interviews with their authors to reflect on the practices, reasons, strengths and weaknesses of using mixed methods. We argue that mixed methods provide sustainable tourism academics with more opportunities for pragmatic transformative research for societal change, and increases research reliability in relation to social desirability bias, stakeholder comparisons and interdisciplinarity.