The global outbreak of COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on the sensitive and fragile tourism industry. How to integrate resources, resolve the crisis and achieve a sustainable evolutionary upgrading of enterprise resilience under COVID-19 has become a key element for the tourism industry to respond and adapt to external environmental shocks. This study uses resource orchestration theory as an explanatory framework to delineate and reveal the mechanisms of resilience progression for tourism enterprises in China, and proposes a pathway to achieve resilience progression for tourism enterprises. The study finds that under the impact of COVID-19, tourism enterprises achieve resilience activation, recovery and breakthrough through the dynamic cycle of “dynamic environment awakens resource portfolio → resource portfolio triggers dynamic capabilities → dynamic capabilities guide resource actions → resource actions achieve resilience advantage”. The resource portfolio in each stage is both the basis of resource actions in the current stage and fed by resource actions in the previous stage. This cycle of evolution constitutes the progression path of enterprise resilience in the process of interaction with the dynamic environment, which enables tourism enterprises to recover and rebound from COVID-19 and complete transformation and upgrading with the pressure of COVID-19. Based on the mechanism of the resilience progression of tourism enterprises, this study proposes a pathway for achieving resilience in tourism enterprises from five dimensions: government, industry, market, enterprise and individual.