As a comprehensive industry with a long industrial chain, strong driving effect, and great market potential, the cultural tourism industry is becoming an important force in stimulating urban economic growth and enhancing people’s well-being. Based on surveys and research, combined with the analysis of actual transaction data from the Meituan platform, it can be seen that urban cultural tourism consumption in China shows development characteristics and trends such as the deep integration of “technology and cultural tourism” adding new momentum to tourism consumption, cross-city consumption becoming an important engine driving growth, and a shift from sightseeing to in-depth vacationing, experiences, and leisure. At the same time, it also faces challenges such as uneven regional development and declining consumer prices. It is recommended to focus on the following areas to enrich urban cultural tourism consumption formats and scenarios, better meet the diverse, multi-level, and multifaceted spiritual and cultural needs of the public, and promote urban innovation during the 15th Five-Year Plan period: cultivating and developing the performance and event economy to fully leverage multi-format synergy; innovating diversified service consumption scenarios to create immersive consumer experience spaces; fully exploring the consumption development potential of cultural tourism markets in various cities and vigorously developing the nighttime economy; and developing new scenarios and products that align with group preferences to discover and meet the cultural tourism consumption needs of middle-aged and elderly groups.