Rita Hernandez

President and Founder PremierDS (Premier Destination Services)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Rita Hernandez is the founder and President of PremierDS, a destination-services and immigration company that handles the practical side of corporate relocation for multinational employers moving staff into and out of South East Florida, Latin America and the Caribbean. The work is the unglamorous machinery of global mobility: finding a house, placing children in a school, securing a visa and work permit, arranging temporary housing, opening a bank account and getting a family functioning in a city they have never lived in. Hernandez entered the relocation industry in 1988 and spent her first years in domestic US moves before specialising in Latin America, and she founded PremierDS in 2001. The company now operates across more than thirty countries and territories in the region, and she has built environmental and community giving into how it works.

Career Highlights

• Founded PremierDS in 2001 and has run it as President since, with no change of ownership or control recorded in the intervening quarter-century.
• Built the company’s coverage across more than 30 Latin American and Caribbean markets, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean islands, alongside its South East Florida base.
• Named by Industry Era to its Top 10 Admired Leaders of 2024 listing.
• Established the company’s social-responsibility programme: a tree planted through One Tree Planted for every expatriate relocated, recycling drives with Recupera Mexico, and support for Pasaje a la Esperanza in Lima, Peru.
• Works in a market segment where the buyers are multinational corporations and relocation management companies rather than individual movers, which requires compliance and service consistency across dozens of legal jurisdictions at once.

Professional Journey

Hernandez has worked in relocation since 1988. By her own account the first eight years were domestic US relocation, and she then moved into global mobility with a Latin America specialism, which has defined the rest of her career. The pre-2001 sequence recorded on her professional profile runs from the accounting department at Merrill Lynch Relocation, through the Windham International group of companies, to an on-site posting at Schering-Plough as Senior Relocation Coordinator from 1994 to 1999 managing that employer’s global relocation policy, a 1999 transfer to Miami to develop business across Latin America, and a period as Managing Director at LARM Group covering Latin American operations. None of those roles is independently documented in a primary source and the dates should be treated as unconfirmed.

In 2001 she founded PremierDS in South East Florida. The strategic bet was that multinational employers and the relocation management companies they hire wanted a single destination-services partner who actually understood Latin America, rather than a patchwork of local vendors negotiated country by country. Over the following two decades the company extended coverage across the region, and its published service list now spans home finding, school search, settling-in and departure assistance, property and tenancy management, temporary housing, transportation coordination, and the immigration side – visa and work permit applications and local documentation.

PremierDS does not publish a leadership page, and Hernandez’s public profile has come mainly through industry award listings rather than corporate communications. She was named to Industry Era’s Top 10 Admired Leaders of 2024, a solicited award feature in which she described a leadership approach built on hard work, integrity and empathy, and on continuous learning inside the organisation. The company’s stated social-responsibility commitments – tree planting for each relocation, recycling partnerships in Mexico, and funding transport to medical care for families in Peru – are presented as part of how the business operates rather than as a separate programme.

Education

No college or university education has been established for Rita Hernandez in any available source. An earlier version of this profile listed a New Jersey high school on the strength of contact-database scrapes alone; that has been removed as unverified.