Omar Andrés Atuesta, a 36-year-old industrial designer from Colombia, built Nómada 22, a fully automated boutique hotel in the center of Neiva, the capital of the Huila department, whose entrance mimics a cinema ticket booth and operates with no front desk staff, since guests receive access through a digital code delivered exclusively after booking, opening a door that, from the street, gives no visible sign it leads to a hotel.
Design over convention guided every decision Atuesta made, from the hidden entrance to the room layout, and that principle is the clearest way to understand why Nómada 22 functions differently from the standard Colombian hotel model and why it attracted attention well beyond the Huila tourism sector.
A professional path that converged on hospitality
Atuesta holds a degree in industrial design from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá and a specialization in export product management from the Universidad Javeriana, two credentials that gave him a structural understanding of how spaces function and how goods reach markets, a combination that proved directly applicable when he decided to convert a family-owned property in Neiva into a lodging business rather than lease it conventionally.
Before that decision, his prior years managing short-term furnished rental listings through platforms including Airbnb and Booking.com gave him direct exposure to what travelers in secondary Colombian cities actually wanted.
That operational clarity then became visible in the hotel’s room structure, which Atuesta designed around three distinct guest segments: families needing bunk-bed capacity for up to four people, solo travelers or couples in standard rooms, and executives or privacy-seeking guests in terrace rooms, all with private bathrooms and access to shared areas including a co-working space, a fully equipped kitchen, a café, and a game zone designed to encourage interaction among guests. He drew that community-atmosphere concept from an automated hotel he visited in the Netherlands during a 2023 trip to run the Paris Marathon, and after returning, he applied it directly to the Neiva design.
Financing on a family model and a community anchor
Atuesta financed Nómada 22 in two stages: his mother, Mercedes, covered the initial 3D visualization study from personal savings, while a bank loan funded the full physical renovation of the space, a structure that kept ownership tight and decision-making within the family team, which also includes his sister, Erika, overseeing decoration and interior atmosphere. In addition, the Cámara de Comercio del Huila provided institutional support through training programs and operational guidance, which Atuesta credited as a determining factor in sustaining consistent daily operations through the hotel’s first year.
However, that first year produced one correction Atuesta identified as the project’s clearest early mistake: launching without a defined social media strategy or a fixed monthly budget for digital content. Once corrected, that adjustment nearly doubled Nómada 22’s occupancy rate and generated enough surplus revenue to fund the hotel’s next planned zone, confirming that the underlying model was commercially sound even though the initial marketing approach was not.
Neiva’s tourism positioning and the scalability case
As Nómada 22 approaches its first full year of operation, Atuesta confirmed that the business model carries explicit scalability plans, with expansion to other Colombian cities through partnerships with investors who already operate in the tourism sector, since his stated preference is for co-investors who understand the market rather than generalist capital that would require extensive orientation time before contributing productively.
In the short term, the hotel plans to add a private jacuzzi room with natural ventilation; in a 10-year horizon, Atuesta projected a full lodging portfolio serving both domestic and international travelers, with Neiva positioned as a tourism benchmark within the Huila department.
The truth is that Nómada 22’s relevance extends beyond one family business in a secondary city, because it demonstrates that Colombia’s untapped hospitality potential in departments like Huila does not require foreign capital or chain hotel infrastructure: only professional design discipline, precise market knowledge, and the institutional backing that bodies like the Cámara de Comercio already provide to entrepreneurs who engage them consistently.