The development of a diversified ecological compensation system is an important task of China’s ecological civilization construction in the new era. Developing a market-oriented ecological compensation mechanism for tourism contributes to enriching and improving China’s ecological compensation system. Based on the literature review and an ecological-economic analysis framework, this study summarized the government-led and community-based tourism ecological compensation, and clarified the connotation, characteristics, and stakeholders of tourism market-oriented ecological compensation. We then explored the operation mechanism of tourism market-oriented ecological compensation. The results show that: tourism market-oriented ecological compensation forms an ecological tourism supply-demand docking platform, which has the characteristics of realizing the value of ecological resources through market transactions, endogenousness and feedback loops, and diversified participants. Tourists, tourism enterprises, community residents, and local governments are the main stakeholders of the platform. Its operating mechanism is that based on cooperation and investment, community residents and tourism companies convert the natural resources and ecosystem services into ecological tourism products, then tourists purchase the eco-tourism products and services to form direct and indirect compensation for the tourism enterprises, community residents, and destination ecosystem, thereby developing a sustainable market-oriented compensation path of “transaction-profit-incentive-transaction”. The prerequisite of the operating mechanism is to determine the property rights of resources, the key is to realize the ecological value of resources, the core is the interactive incentive for the transaction of ecological service functions, and government regulation is an important guarantee in the multi-party game.