This paper takes a mixed-method and computational discourse analytic approach to look at data from all listings and reviews from Airbnb in New York City, combined with ACS census data, to identify a number of themes in how both reviewers and hosts partake in staging and performing “new urban tourism”, which simultaneously shapes an imaginary of what is meant by urban authenticity. This exploration is contextualized in a framework of research on consumerist society, postmodern tourism and Disneyfication, allowing the empirical material to provide the foundation for a broader theoretical argument, showing how these platforms provide a decentralized staging of a cosmopolitan experience by using the aesthetics of Otherness, in turn founded on colonial tropes of the “noble savage”, to provide a tourism commodity representing “authenticity”.