Accurate tourist flow prediction is key to ensuring the normal operation of popular scenic spots. However, one single model cannot effectively grasp the characteristics of the data and make accurate predictions because of the strong nonlinear characteristics of daily tourist flow data. Accordingly, this study predicts daily tourist flow in Huangshan Scenic Spot in China. A prediction method (GA-CNN-LSTM) which combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short-term memory network (LSTM) and optimized by genetic algorithm (GA) is established. First, network search data, meteorological data, and other data are constructed into continuous feature maps. Then, feature vectors are extracted by convolutional neural network (CNN). Finally, the feature vectors are input into long-short-term memory network (LSTM) in time series for prediction. Moreover, GA is used to scientifically select the number of neurons in the CNN-LSTM model. Data is preprocessed and normalized before prediction. The accuracy of GA-CNN-LSTM is evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean absolute error (MAE), Pearson correlation coefficient and index of agreement (IA). For a fair comparison, GA-CNN-LSTM model is compared with CNN-LSTM, LSTM, CNN and the back propagation neural network (BP). The experimental results show that GA-CNN-LSTM model is approximately 8.22% higher than CNN-LSTM on the performance of MAPE.