As the most popular mode of out-of-school education in recent years, study tour plays an important role in the comprehensive ability improvement and overall development of students. Based on the path planning problem of study tour, this paper proposes a travel route optimization model with time optimization as the goal orientation, aiming to plan the time-optimal path for students in the study tour process. The particle swarm algorithm is used to improve the genetic algorithm for solving the travel route optimization model. The effectiveness of the optimization model and the hybrid algorithm is verified through the analysis of an actual case of a study tour, and the experimental results are substantially optimized compared with the traditional planning path, reducing the time spent by 2.2 days. Then we use qualitative comparative analysis method to explore the efficiency improvement of the curriculum of study tours, and obtain four grouping paths, which can cover more than 85% of the cases. The research in this paper not only helps to enrich the academic research of cross disciplines in the form of “travel + education”, but also provides theoretical basis and practical reference for the development of study tours to a certain extent.