This study was intended to explore the relationship of gender, perceived language ability with communication strategy use by tourism-oriented EFL learners studying at the universities in the Southwest China to improve and maintain their oral communication in English. The Communication Strategy Questionnaire was used for data collection, and the quantitative method such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Chi-square tests were employed for data analysis. The results demonstrated that although the gender and perceived language ability had minor relationship with students' overall use of communication strategy, the gender and the perceived language ability showed their significant variations in the students' choice of individual communication strategies.