Abstract: As an important development axis of tourism in China, the improvement of tourism quality and efficiency has become the focus of attention of the whole society. Based on the panel data of 110 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2002 to 2019, this paper uses DEA model to measure the efficiency of tourism industry in each city. On the basis of time series analysis and spatial correlation analysis, the spatial and temporal dynamic evolution characteristics of tourism industry efficiency of cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt are discussed by using traditional and spatial Markov chains. The results show that：（1）On the whole, the tourism industry efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt is at a low level and shows a trend of slow decline in fluctuation. There is still a great space for technological progress and resource conservation in the process of tourism development. On the whole, the spatial pattern of tourism industry efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt shows the characteristics of “zhou high, middle and low”, and the efficiency of tourism industry in the eastern and western regions is higher than that in the central region.（2）The efficiency of the tourism industry in the Yangtze River Economic Belt has the stability of maintaining the original state, and the probability of transferring to the low level is slightly higher than the probability of transferring to the high level on the whole, and the probability of leapfrog transfer is extremely low.（3）Geographical background of the tourism industry in the Yangtze River Economic Belt had a great effect on efficiency of dynamic evolution, drive the surrounding city tourism industry due to its high efficiency city upward shift probability increases, and the tourism industry efficiency low cities around inhibits shift upwards, and gradually formed the high concentration, high drive low “club convergence” phenomenon.