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This contribution offers a quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of discourse markers (DMs) in an emerging digital genre: online travel reviews posted on TripAdvisor. In particular, we analyse reviews written in Italian, which is still an understudied language in this context. We analyze a corpus consisting of 200 negative and 200 positive hotel reviews, investigating which types of DMs are used, their functions, and their interpretive contribution to the review context. Our findings show that the number of occurrences of DMs is significantly higher within negative reviews when compared to positive ones. Further, DMs detected in the two groups of reviews are distributed in different functional categories: the majority of DMs in negative reviews have interactional functions, whereas the majority of DMs in positive reviews have meta-textual functions. Finally, we also offer a qualitative analysis of specific DMs, discussing the pragmatic functions of actual examples extracted from our corpus.