With the rapid development of tourism, tourism highways play an increasingly important role in promoting the integrated development of local economy and tourism. Especially in the Greater Sanya region, the optimization of the design and construction of tourism highways can effectively enhance the synergistic development of the regional tourism economy and highway transportation system. The “double leaders” of universities have a unique role in promoting such projects, which can contribute to the improvement of policies, the optimization of industrial structure and the enhancement of regional economy. This paper adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to study the linkage development path of the Greater Sanya Tourism Highway Economy, and analyzes the synergistic role played by university “double leaders” in this process. Firstly, an evaluation system for the linkage development of tourism and highway economy in Greater Sanya was established, covering the dimension of tourism economy and highway transportation. Second, the entropy value method was used to assign weights to the indicators, and the comprehensive development level of tourism highway economy and transportation was evaluated. The results show that the number of domestic tourists received is the most important in the economic dimension of tourist highways, accounting for 17.715%, while in the dimension of highway transportation, the weights of “highway passenger traffic” and “highway mileage” are higher, 16.846% and 16.430%, respectively. Finally, the expert scores indicate that the economic and transportation system development levels of the Greater Sanya Tourist Highway are good to excellent, with a composite score of 4.32 and 4.35, respectively. It is concluded that the economic development model of the tourist highway, which is based on the collaborative planning of the university’s “two leaders”, is effective and operable.
