To address the insufficient expressive capabilities of traditional methods in assessing the development level of rural tourism, this study explores the fusion application of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the Back Propagation (BP) algorithm to enhance the accuracy and comprehensiveness of rural tourism development assessment. Firstly, this study introduces the BERT deep learning model and its applications in natural language processing, alongside the role of the BP algorithm in pattern recognition and predictive analysis. Subsequently, a framework for assessing rural tourism development levels, integrating BERT and the BP algorithm, is proposed. This framework collects multidimensional rural tourism-related data and utilizes the BERT model for sentiment analysis and topic extraction from textual data. Empirical analysis of rural tourism development in a specific region validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate: (1) The model achieves an accuracy of 84.33% and an F1 score of 85.33% on the publicly available Laptop dataset, with a processing time of 20 s, significantly outperforming other methods. Compared to traditional approaches, the proposed method accurately captures correlations between textual information and numerical data, thereby enhancing the credibility and accuracy of assessment results. (2) From the ablation study results, it is evident that removing any component from the model leads to performance degradation. Specifically, removing the Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) reduces accuracy and F1 scores to 78.21% and 76.33% on the Laptop dataset, and to 85.10% and 70.45% on the Tourist_F dataset. Removing Text Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) reduces accuracy and F1 scores to 79.34% and 77.56% on the Laptop dataset, and to 86.25% and 72.11% on the Tourist_F dataset. The most significant performance decline occurs upon removing BERT, with accuracy and F1 scores decreasing to 70.14% and 66.43% on the Laptop dataset, and to 78.45% and 60.33% on the Tourist_F dataset. These results indicate that BiGcRU, TextCNN, and BERT each contribute significantly to the model’s performance. This study provides substantial support for advancing sustainable development in rural tourism, offering significant practical and innovative value.