New and more advanced guidance systems are nowadays available, allowing bringing natural light into buildings and offering potentials for energy savings associated to well-being for occupants. From a design point of view, the key factor is the knowledge of their photometric performances in terms of global light transmission efficiency, so as to predict the daylight availability in an interior space due to an array of guidance systems (or, the other way around, to predict the number of pipes needed to produce a minimum natural light illuminance according to standard requirement) through known analytical methods such as the lumen method. In spite of this, determining the global light transmission efficiency of advanced guidance systems is a quite complicate matter because of the redirecting optical properties these elements rely on even in the case of simple typologies (for instance, passive domes with micro-prismatic profiles and micro-prismatic or holographic films used as pipe's coating). This paper presents an approach to characterize photometric performances of tubular daylight guidance systems in terms of light transmission efficiency: the global system efficiency is the result of the product of the efficiencies of the three individual components (collector, pipe and diffuser) and each efficiency is determined as the ratio of the flux emitted through the output window to the flux hitting the input window, accounting for both the beam and the diffuse efficiency. The approach, based on both measurements on physical models and simulations, was applied to different typologies of pipes and passive collectors and the obtained data were used to eventually calculate the global efficiency for the analyzed system. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.