Scoring governance & the right of reply

1 · What an Index score is — and is not

Every Index score is editorial opinion. It comes from applying a published instrument to publicly available materials. They include brand-standard pages, official policy documents, filed customer-service plans, pricing pages, product and app documentation, and stated terms, as of the date printed on each Index. A “No” on any check means one thing: we did not find a documented public commitment to that item. It is not an assertion that a company fails to deliver the item in practice, and no Index grades any single stay, flight, booking, or interaction. Where an Index measures on-the-ground execution, we say so explicitly. That is the on-site evaluation behind Sales-Ready Certified™ — and the only place we make execution claims.

2 · The evidence basis

Each check is scored against the public record at the time of evaluation. The published rule: unstated, “varies,” “usually,” “at participating locations,” and “contact sales” score No — because a traveler or buyer cannot plan on an unpublished practice. Every Index page states its scoring date and carries a changelog. Company and product names are used nominatively — to identify whose published commitments are being described — and all trademarks remain the property of their owners.

3 · The right of reply

Any scored company may exercise all three of the following, at any time, at no cost:

Correction. If a documented public commitment contradicts a No, send the documentation to rachel@thesalestraveler.com. Verified corrections update the score within 7 days, are noted in that Index's changelog, and appear on the public corrections ledger.

Response. A scored company may submit a written response of up to 150 words regarding its entry. We publish it, verbatim and attributed, alongside the entry — including responses that disagree with us. Disagreement with the method is not a correction, but readers deserve to see it.

Update. If a company changes its published commitments after scoring, we re-score the affected checks on request under the same 7-day standard. This is not a concession; it is the point of the Index. When a company starts promising in public what it previously didn't, everyone won.

4 · Independence

No payment, partnership, certification fee, or advertising relationship changes an Index score, in either direction — and declining to do business with us doesn't either. Certification revenue and editorial coverage are separated. The certification's own criteria, fail path, and revocation policy are published. Its fee buys the evaluation, never the outcome. Our commercial rates are public for the same reason our method is: hidden terms are exactly what we score against. The same test applies to anything we claim about a partner's commercial outcome, so the attribution standard publishes what we will and won't count — including the booking channels no publisher can honestly see.

5 · How a call is made, and by what

Every score on this site decomposes into individual checks, and each check is a yes-or-no question about a document the company published. A check scores Yes only when the company's own material commits to it in writing. Unstated is No. "Varies by property" is No. "Contact sales" is No.

Every score-affecting call is made by a named human editor. Automation may retrieve a document, quote the exact passage, record when it was read, and prepare it for review. It may not decide that the passage satisfies a scoring check. Every scored entry carries a ruledBy field naming the accountable human role.

A machine-prepared proposal is evidence, not a verdict. PRESENT and ABSENT both require human review. Where a commitment is hedged, conditional, blocked, or only visible to a logged-in customer, the proposal remains unresolved rather than becoming a No.

What no machine here may do, ever: change a score in response to a payment, a partnership, an approach from a scored company, or an instruction to be kinder or harsher. Commercial relationships are separated from scoring by design, and that separation is enforced in the build itself rather than by good intentions. The deploy fails if a paid call-to-action appears on a page that rates the entity being sold to.

We publish this rather than leaving it to be assumed. A desk whose product is that its claims can be checked cannot make an exception for claims about itself. If you think a call is wrong, send the evidence. Corrections publish on a seven-day clock and the ledger is public, including our own mistakes.

6 · Errors, in both directions

We hold ourselves to the standard we apply. Our own errors are corrected on the same 7-day clock and logged permanently on the ledger — which opened with one of ours, self-caught. An error pointed out with evidence will never be treated as an attack; it is a contribution to the record, and the record is the product.

7 · Contact

Corrections, responses, re-score requests, press, and legal inquiries: rachel@thesalestraveler.com. Include documentation and the Index and entry concerned; the 7-day clock starts on receipt.

7 · What a buyer can hand procurement

For paid research, operator dashboards, and licensed data, this page is part of the enterprise collateral set: what the score means, what can change it, how quickly the desk must correct it, and where the right of reply lives. Pair it with proof-of-source, the corrections ledger, and the citation kit when a buyer needs to prove that the underlying standard is governed, versioned, and challengeable in public.

The Index Desk → The corrections ledger Editorial policy