<p>The picturesque landscape of Darjeeling hill region provides ample prospects for river-based tourism development. Thus, a weighted index method has been employed to compute river tourism development, utilizing seven factors namely distance from highways, distance from the nearest town, road density, existing accommodation density, slope, LULC and stream order. The Geo-detector model has been used to identify the driving factors of river tourism development, and for understanding their spatial heterogeneity, Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) has been applied. The result indicates that the influencing factors such as distance from nearest town (0.28) and LULC (0.20) has the strongest effect compared to road density (0.08) with least influence on growth of river tourism. Moreover, GWR model’s findings demonstrate that there exist variations in the influence of each driving factor on the spatial distribution of river tourism development, such as the correlation between river tourism and distance from the nearest town is highest near major towns in the west and south compared to eastern towns. The findings emphasize upon the importance of targeted policies and propose scientific management actions for the development of the river tourism in Darjeeling hills, including regular monitoring and involving local stakeholders in the administration of environmental standards.</p>