With the rapid development of tourism industry, its negative impact on the ecological environment is gradually increasing. In order to alleviate the contradiction between the development of tourism economy and the protection of ecological environment, it is necessary for the government to exert its constraint on tourism enterprises at the institutional level, so as to reduce the pressure of tourism environment and realize the sustainable development of tourism industry.Based on this, this paper firstly uses the super efficiency SBM model to measure the ecological efficiency of tourism industry in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River from 2006 to 2017. Then, the evolution characteristics of spatial pattern are described by gravity model and standard deviation ellipse. Finally, the paper establishes the panel data model with generalized least square method to analyze the temporal and spatial differentiation characteristics of the impact of environmental regulation on the ecological efficiency of tourism industry in urban agglomeration. The main conclusions are as follows:1) From 2006 to 2017, the overall ecological efficiency of tourism industry in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration has always been below the production frontier, and the ecological development of tourism industry has been at a low level.From the regional scale, there are some differences in the efficiency among the three urban agglomerations. The efficiency of the urban agglomeration around the Poyang Lake is the highest, while that of Wuhan urban agglomeration is the lowest. From the perspective of spatial pattern, the center of gravity of efficiency is moving to the northeast as a whole, and the spatial pattern of "high in the east and low in the west" is gradually formed; 2) The non-linear relationship between environmental regulation and eco efficiency of tourism industry in the three sub urban agglomerations shows that the overall level of environmental regulation is still low, and the intensity of environmental regulation plays a restraining role in the growth of eco efficiency of tourism industry. However, in the long run, with the gradual enhancement of environmental regulation, its impact on eco efficiency of tourism industry begins to change to a positive direction; 3) In the three sub urban agglomerations, the impact of environmental regulation on the eco efficiency of tourism industry is different. On the whole, the number of cities that environmental regulation has a significant positive impact on the ecological efficiency of tourism industry is small, mainly concentrated near the central city of each sub urban agglomeration.