Summer residential tourism is the future trend in China because of tourists’ living quality improvement, heat crisis, rising market demand, and optimization of the destinations’ residential environment, transport and accessibility. Compared with summer tourism and vacation tourism, summer residential tourism had got less attention and lacks in prospective and preventive research. Hence, this study focused on potential assessment, pattern recognition and phase segmentation of 32 residential tourism destinations in China selected from 4 lists. An index system of 16 indicators from 5 dimensions was established as Summer Residence Index (SRI), and Range method, Entropy weight method and Composite index method were chosen as the core methods. Three main conclusions were as follows. (1) Only 2 typical districts’ SRI value were near to 0.6, and 4 destinations were below 0.1, about 26 destinations were at medium-level, which indicated that China’s summer residential tourism was not so popular and only few destinations have stepped into a higher level. (2) Seven patterns could be recognized based on the contribution of the 5 dimensions to SRI value, including 3 single-factor driven patterns and 4 compound factors driven patterns. (3) Like tourist area life cycle (TALC), Unconscious stage, Initial stage, Developmental stage and Maturity stage could be segmented for summer residential destinations with the value of below 0.1, 0.1-0.3, 0.3-0.5, and above 0.5. Four destinations were under Unconscious stage. Twenty-two destinations were at initiate stage. Only 4 destinations have stepped into development stage and 2 at maturity stage. China' summer residential tourism has just started and has a better prospect. This study is just an attempt and needs further consideration, for example, a tracking study of SRI calculation for each year will be carried to justify the effectiveness of SRI and to check the rationality of the empirical results. As time goes on, policies in housing, residential estate and other aspects should be included as a factor in the SRI index. Data availability should be optimized because of better data sources and new technologies. Some other districts or cities in 2 batches of national Comprehensive Tourism Demonstration Zones (CTDZs) pilots and provincial CTDZs will be further selections of summer residential tourism destinations.