With the continuous development of modern information technology, GIS has been widely used in tourism fields, especially on all aspects research of tourism resources, including the tourism resources spatial classification, tourism resource monomers evaluation, tourism resource planning mapping, tourism resources management, tourism resources development and utilization, which have obtained the significant achievements. The analysis of the current situation and trend of GIS in the research and application of tourism resources in China is of great significance to understand the theoretical technology system and guide the application of tourism resources. Firstly, this paper reviews the literature in which GIS is used in the research of tourism resources for recent years. According to the study, we found that the GIS theory and method have made substantial progress on the mapping and evaluation of tourism resources. However, the cognition, classification and evaluation of tourism resources remain unsolved problems which included spatial scale and dimension, types of recognition and switching, spatial coupling, the transformation relationship between resources and products, development sequence, etc. However, there are still some unsolved problems in the fields, such as tourism resources cognition, classification and evaluation. Secondly, through summarizes the predecessors' research achievements and group for many years, tourism resources survey, evaluation, planning experience, the paper systematically discusses the tourism resources cognition, tourism resources classification, tourism resources standardization and tourism resources evaluation. At the same time, the paper also discusses the GIS spatial analysis method applies to the regional difference of tourism resources, tourism traffic location, spatial combination analysis, trend prediction and the spatial correlation analysis. Through combing GIS modeling and spatial analysis methods in the tourism resources information extraction and analysis, evaluation of tourism resources, tourism resources development planning and other relevant studies,we found that tourism resources research methods changed from qualitative description to quantitative model, and the application results continued to increase, involved in the comprehensive evaluation, spatial structure optimization, spatial layout and site selection, space development trend forecast, space utilization planning, etc. Finally, we put forward the trend of tourism resources in the future, regarding the knowledge model, knowledge mapping, multidimensional simulation and big data of the tourism resources. The trend of the integrated development of GIS and tourism resource research focuses on the innovation of spatial thinking mode and technological method. The new research includes that increasing GIS scholar invested in the research of tourism resources, building a case for the development of tourism resources and the knowledge model, an intelligent dynamic 3d visualization, increasing the immersion, experience and spatial decision making of tourism researchers and tourists.