Platform discourse as governance proxies: flagship attractions, urban tourism governance, and evidence from Taipei 101

This study examines how visitor perceptions of Taipei 101, Taiwan’s tallest building and flagship attraction, reflect urban tourism governance performance during COVID-19 disruption and early post-pandemic recovery. As an iconic landmark, it draws visitors not only to the building itself but also to surrounding Xinyi District, Taipei’s modern commercial and entertainment hub developed through large-scale urban renewal, and is featured on official tourism websites. The study argues that visible urban landmarks function as governance proxies, sites through which visitors negotiate and evaluate the competence, fairness, and legitimacy of destination management via digital platform discourse. User-generated content from TripAdvisor was collected using Python-based web crawling (12,170 reviews up to 30 April 2021). Text-mining techniques, including TF-IDF, latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling, and sentiment analysis, were applied. Architectural design, observatory views, and central location dominate positive narratives, while dissatisfaction clusters around pricing, queuing, crowd density, and access management. Post-pandemic reviews show increased negative and mixed sentiment. Visitors evaluate Taipei 101 as an integrated urban environment whose performance shapes judgements about fairness and governance credibility. Managing flagship attractions requires integrating pricing transparency, crowd control, timed-entry systems, and communication strategies. Platform discourse serves as an early-warning resource for destination management organisations (DMOs). The study conceptualises flagship landmarks as governance proxies, distinguishing this concept from destination image, eWOM, tourist satisfaction, perceived value, place branding, and tourism governance. It links micro-level UGC to macro-level legitimacy in post-pandemic urban tourism contexts. As a single case study, it offers an analytically transferable framework for urban tourism research.