KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS Q. Does this favour big resorts over small homestays? A. The opposite. A small homestay with really warm service can out-score a large property, because the score measures experience, not size or marketing budget. The homestay in Munnar that retrained its staff climbs the same corridor page the resort is on. Q. Isn’t a government hospitality score an overreach? A. The state already markets the destination and runs the DTPCs; an audited experience layer simply makes that marketing honest. Operators opt in, and the score is theirs to improve. It is closer to a publicinterest review standard than to regulation. What would make this program fail Tourism Excellence fails the moment its score loses integrity. If operators successfully buy ratings, or competitors successfully plant negative ones, the score becomes noise, visitors stop trusting it, and the program is worse than useless; it has lent a public imprimatur to a corrupted signal. This is why the verification of genuine on-location visits, the minimum-volume publication threshold, and the dispute-and-audit path are not features but loadbearing structure, and why the institution measures the health of the rating mechanism as carefully as the ratings themselves. 161