Intelligent technology provides opportunities for educational innovation, and its introduction into tourism English teaching and the construction of a flipped classroom model can help improve students’ professional competence and cross-cultural communication ability, and cultivate composite talents in line with the industry’s needs. Based on the concept of Content-Based Instruction (CBI), this study adopts the Learning Channel Smart Teaching Platform to build a flipped classroom teaching model, which is implemented through three stages of teaching: self-study before class, guided study during class and study after class, and conducts a semester-long comparative experiment in the School of Tourism, University C. The experimental results show that the mean score of students’ tourism English in the experimental class reaches 85.76 points, which is 11.17 points higher than that of the control class, and the difference is significant at the 1% level. The passing rate of the students in the experimental class reaches 100% and the excellence rate is 27.08%, much higher than the 84.78% and 4.35% of the control class. The questionnaire survey shows that 78.02% of the students think that the flipped classroom teaching enhances the learning motivation, 77.56% of the students think that it improves the understanding of the course content, and 82.76% of the students are satisfied with the way of course assessment and evaluation. The flipped classroom teaching mode based on the Learning Express platform not only enhances students’ learning interest and performance in tourism English, but also strengthens teaching interactivity and optimizes the learning experience. In the experimental class, 74.99% of the students were willing to actively interact with the teacher in the classroom, which was significantly higher than the traditional teaching mode. The study shows that the flipped classroom teaching with intelligent technology support can effectively improve the quality of tourism English education, and provides new ideas and practical references for the reform of tourism English teaching in colleges and universities.
