It is of important practical value to improve the carbon emission efficiency of tourism industry for realizing high-quality development of the tourism industry in the background of carbon neutrality and carbon peaks. Based on the panel data of provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities in China from 2001 to 2018, the location quotient and a super undesirable slack-based model are applied to measure the tourism agglomeration and tourism carbon emission efficiency, and then to analyze the spatial variation and spatial correlation of the two. Finally, the spatial panel Durbin model is established to study the spatial spillovers of tourism agglomeration on tourism carbon emission efficiency. The results show that:(1) the level of tourism agglomeration in the central and western regions has been improved significantly, while there is no obvious change in the eastern areas; The level of tourism carbon emission efficiency has not changed significantly in other regions except Hebei Province, Shanxi Province, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. From the trend of the variation, the spatial variation of the two high-level areas mostly spread to the surrounding regions with the existing agglomeration areas as the center. (2) Tourism agglomeration has a significantly positive influence on improving the tourism carbon emission efficiency, and there is also a positively spatial spillover effect. Besides that, the tourism carbon emission efficiency has a negatively spatial spillover effect, which indicates the increase of its own province will have a negative impact on the surrounding provinces. It is possible that the competition of low-carbon technology, talents, information and other resource elements between the surrounding provinces result in the negatively spatial spillover effect. (3) All of the economic development, industrial structure, urbanization, openness, technological progress and environmental regulation can promote the tourism carbon emission efficiency to various degrees, but the effect of urbanization is not significant, and the property right structure of tourism industry has a significantly negative influence on the carbon tourism emission efficiency. Furthermore, the economic development and urbanization has a positively spatial spillover effect, while the industrial structure shows a strongly negative spatial spillover effect. The positive spillover effect of technological progress and openness are not significant. In the future, the positive spillover effect of tourism agglomeration on the tourism carbon emission efficiency should be strengthened. At the same time, we should further improve the positively spatial spillover effect of the economic development and urbanization, and promote the positively spatial spillover effect of openness and technological progress. In addition, accelerating the transform that the property right structure of the tourism industry has a negative impact on the tourism carbon emission efficiency.