Age: 26
Year Graduated: 2011
Occupation: Assistant Director of Front Office at the DoubleTree by Hilton Orlando at SeaWorld
Current Location: Orlando, Florida
Meet David Perez, a Nona Alumni who has since become a part of the hospitality industry that makes Orlando one of the best tourist destinations in the nation. Nonahood News was able to reach out to Perez and learn about his journey into the hospitality industry and how he’s taken on life since graduating from Lake Nona High School.
Perez told us how he and his family were first brought to the Lake Nona area in the early 2000s. “My family and I moved to Lake Nona because my father had lost his job in Miami due to September 11. He relocated on his own first to Orlando since he found a job, and about eight months later, my mother, my sisters, and I came. We moved into Lake Nona in 2002, and my parents still currently reside there.”
While he was a student at Lake Nona, his post-high school goals included graduating from college, becoming an accountant, and opening up his own accounting practice. Perez ended up going to UCF for accounting but realized that he was more geared toward the hospitality field and changed his professional goals along the way.
“I started as a bellman seven years ago at the Melia Orlando Suites Hotel in Celebration. After six months of working as a bellman and occasionally filling in at the front desk, I was promoted to the reservations department as a reservations agent. Shortly after being there for a year, I took an opportunity as a front desk agent at the Renaissance Orlando Airport Hotel to work for the Marriott brand. Within six months, I was promoted to supervisor, and a year later, I was promoted to assistant front office manager. In December 2015, I took a job at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort as a front desk manager. After being there for a little over two years, that is when I decided to relocate and transfer to Atlanta and work at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis as a front desk manager as well. I worked in Atlanta for about a year and a half and felt I had enough time away from home, therefore I decided I wanted to come back to be close to my family once more and to the city I grew up in. I was … blessed with an opportunity of getting a promotion to the position I currently hold. Although these weren’t my goals during high school, I have aspired to have new goals in the hospitality industry and hope to be a general manager of a hotel one day.”
In the next five years, he sees himself growing his family in a house of his own. His sights are also set on getting higher up in hospitality. “Short term, I’m looking to be a director of front office and then onto a director of rooms. Long term, I want to be a general manager.” He eventually wants to work at one of the larger, upscale hotel properties in our city beautiful, but he is very happy to have hit the milestone of holding the current position he has.
“I’m also proud to be at the position that I’m at, especially for such a large hotel (1,020 rooms in total). I’ve moved up quickly, and I continue to use that as motivation for myself because I know what I’m capable of when I put my mind to what I want.”
Outside of his great service in the industry, Perez is a lover of water activities like jet skiing, boating, and wakeboarding and also an avid theme park fan, often visiting both the Disney and Universal parks. Such a fan, in fact, that one of his most recent milestones was proposing to his fiancée in Magic Kingdom.
“Her dream was to get proposed to in front of the castle; therefore, I took all things into account and decided to marry the love of my life there. We met at the Swan and Dolphin as she was doing an international internship. I’m very proud to be marrying such a caring and loving woman.” Dreams really do come true!
