Listening to pilgrims: users reviews as a tool to improve urban reception polices during the Jubilee in Rome
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71014/sieds.v80i4.435Keywords:
jubilee, sentiment analysis, text mining, tourism, romeAbstract
The Jubilee 2025 is expected to attract millions of pilgrims to Rome, placing significant pressure on public services and urban infrastructure. This study explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the automated analysis of online reviews, with the aim of monitoring the perceived quality of the pilgrims’ experience. A corpus of 2,217 user reviews from Google Maps - 1427 related to worship places and 790 to hospitality facilities - was processed through a modular pipeline including text pre-processing, sentiment analysis, and extraction of suggestions and complaints. Results highlight marked differences between the two categories: reviews of worship sites tend to be highly positive and emotionally polarized, while hospitality-related reviews are more nuanced and contain a higher density of constructive feedback. The proposed methodology offers a scalable, low-cost tool for civic listening and urban planning, providing actionable insights that can support public administration in managing complex events such as the Jubilee.
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