Ricardo Pérez Fernández

Before Ricardo Pérez Fernández helped build Transekur, he was the traveller looking for the kind of service it would offer.

During years of travel for consulting work and leisure, professional transportation between airports and hotels had become a familiar part of his journeys. Those experiences gave him a clear sense of what good service should feel like. Back in the Dominican Republic, he saw an opportunity to offer more of that same consistency and attention to detail.

The idea was personal before it was commercial: create the service he wanted to find as a passenger.

Ricardo grew up between the Dominican Republic and the United States and has lived in Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Spain and Belgium. Those different places, together with his international travels, shaped his expectations of professional service. His background is also academic. An economist by training, he holds master's degrees in macroeconometrics, political economy and political science. Transekur would become his first formal business venture.

For that step, he joined someone he had known long before either of them thought about starting a company. Ricardo and Dan Guzmán met in first grade. Their friendship continued through school and their university years in the Dominican Republic, where both completed their bachelor's degrees before taking different professional paths.

When they came together to build Transekur, those different experiences became an advantage. Their personalities and strengths were not identical, and they saw value in that contrast. A long friendship provided trust; their complementary perspectives gave them different ways to approach the business.

They have also had to learn how to be business partners as well as friends. Balancing personal loyalty with professional accountability has been part of the company's development, particularly when difficult decisions involve someone who has shared so much of your life.

Ricardo's approach to management starts with the passenger. Before approving a new element of the service, he tries to experience it as a customer would. Something that falls short of his own expectations of genuinely premium transportation is not something he believes should be offered to Transekur's customers. That perspective keeps the focus on the actual experience, rather than the description on a website.

He applies the same test to innovation and technology: adopting something new is only worthwhile when it improves the journey. Environmental responsibility is part of that thinking. Ricardo believes transportation companies should make a genuine effort to reduce their carbon footprint, including moving towards electric and other cleaner-energy vehicles. These are priorities he wants to advance, not simply labels to attach to a service.

His perspective on Dominican travel and transportation brings together an economist's training, an international traveller's expectations and a co-founder's responsibility for the experience being offered. For Ricardo, premium is not simply how a vehicle looks. It is how the passenger experiences the journey.