Abstract

Recent developments in the research field of the tourism sciences show a growing interest in customer satisfaction. Increasingly mediated communications develop new signification practices within social networks, as Twitter, where tourism companies discover what users think of the service offered, through methodologies such as Sentiment Analysis [Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, 2(1–2), 1–135] and digital natives [Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6] produce short textual content regarding the service of tourist companies, as in the case of Trenitalia. From the analysis of sentiment on tweets about Trenitalia, it emerged that Internet users tend to employ ironic devices, difficult to recognize by a software tool. Starting from this limit, the main intent is to examine how social networks offer a new context to the enunciative practice of irony. To detect these aspects, the thinking aloud technique is used, aiming to understand how digital actors re-build signification practices of tourist mobility and to demonstrate how online reputation and customer satisfaction detection systems are not always effective in understanding why users, when they review a tourist service, use veiled communication methods.