As a national strategy, the policy of rural revitalization is of great significance. Rural tourism is not only one of the important ways to promote rural revitalization but also an effective way to protect and utilize rural resources. To explore the travel influencing factors of rural tourists, this study aims at the core element of rural tourism development. We utilized the questionnaire survey and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate multivariate interactions between variables. The results showed that among the 128 combinations of local emotion, nostalgic emotion, subjective norms, perceptual behavior control, attitudes, desires and destination popularity, 12 had sufficient conditional configurations to influence rural tourists' travel behavior. The consistency of local emotion, nostalgic emotion, attitudes, and desires was relatively high, but it was not a necessary and sufficient condition. The overall coverage of the conditional combination of 12 paths was about 0.9165 and the overall consistency was about 0.918919, both of which met the threshold of 0.9. Tourists were affected by multiple combinations with local emotion and nostalgia as the key factors, which were specific conditions to activate other influencing factors. This paper puts forward the influencing factors and path model of rural tourism based on tourists' living space changes, and reveals the mechanism of four kinds of influence paths: the path of "rural emotion-recreation intention", the path of "planning behavior-recreation intention", the path of "recreation desire-recreation intention" and the emotion-behavior synthesis path. This study also aims at helping the tourism practitioners find the most suitable product development solutions for tourists' recreation.