The SEZ paradox: urban tourism governance and systemic value co-destruction in a rapidly urbanising island city, Phu Quoc, Vietnam

Special Economic Zone (SEZ)-driven development is transforming city destinations worldwide, yet its effects on rapidly urbanising island cities remain largely unexamined in urban tourism research. This study addresses that gap through Phu Quoc, Vietnam’s first island city and now a Special Economic Zone, examining how SEZ-driven development has produced cascading value co-destruction that renders the destination experientially inconsistent for luxury tourists. Drawing on an archival netnographic analysis of N = 848 organic tourist reviews across four platforms (2021–2026), triangulated with macro-structural evidence from peer-reviewed literature, the study develops the Systemic Service Desynchronisation (SSD) framework: a four-stage model specifying how macro-institutional capital dynamics cascade through spatial, operational, and community layers to produce paradox review. Two empirical themes emerge: socio-spatial service voids around luxury resort enclaves, and luxury tension with co-production fracture across five-star properties. The study extends Service-Dominant Logic at three axiom levels and advances the 3Rs governance framework (Recap, Retrospect, Reimagine), within which an AI-enabled Negative Discourse Contagion Index is outlined as a future diagnostic instrument for destination managers and hospitality chief marketing officers (CMOs). The original contribution to urban tourism knowledge is twofold: theoretically, it proposes extending value co-destruction from the dyadic service encounter to the macro-institutional dynamics of SEZ-driven city transformation; practically, it offers tourism-city authorities a replicable, discourse-based diagnostic for governing this transformation as it unfolds.