Resilience serves as a crucial metric for gauging the sustainable development capacity of tourist destinations and has emerged as a novel focal point within the realm of “tourism man-land relationship.” This study endeavors to formulate an evaluative index framework for the resilience of tourism destination environmental systems grounded in the “social-economic-ecological-facilities” dimension. Subsequently, employing the entropy weight model, spatial autocorrelation model, and Geodetector model, the research seeks to conduct a quantitative analysis of the spatio-temporal evolution characteristics and driving factors influencing the resilience of the tourism environmental system within the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The overarching objective is to offer a case-based reference that contributes to the interdisciplinary exploration of resilience theory and tourism environmental systems, enabling a scientific assessment of the sustainable development capacity of tourism destinations, and facilitating the optimization of the development habitat of the regional tourism industry. The results show that: (1) The resilience of the tourism environmental system demonstrates an overall ascending trajectory, albeit with a discernible fragility. The growth rate of resilience within each subsystem follows the sequence of “economic environment>social environment>facility environment >ecological environment.” Moreover, the emergence of two resilience convergence clusters, namely “society-economy” and “facility-ecology,” is observed. (2) The distribution of resilience levels within the tourism environmental systems of provinces and municipalities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt exhibits a noteworthy spatio-temporal transition. The resilience indices of the upstream, midstream, and downstream areas exhibit an upward trend, delineating a pattern of “upstream<midstream <downstream.” (3) Regions with akin resilience levels in tourism environmental systems tend to concentrate, with an overall intensification of spatial agglomeration. Local spatial agglomeration of resilience levels predominantly manifests in two archetypes: “high-high” and “low-low.” Furthermore, a robust “Matthew Effect” characterizes the spatial agglomeration of resilience levels among the upstream, midstream, and downstream areas. (4) The influential power of various index factors on the resilience level of the tourism environmental system exhibits a discernible temporal succession, adhering to the sequence of “ecologically oriented → economically oriented → socially oriented.”