Impartiality & Independence

1. The core principle

The body that writes a standard and the body that decides whether a facility meets it must never be the same incentive. ASF Tourism’s credibility rests entirely on this separation being real, not nominal.

2. Structural separation

Three functions are kept organisationally distinct:

• Standards development — who decides what the criteria say, informed by evidence (the Evidence Base), not by any single facility’s circumstances
• Assessment — who visits a facility and records what the evidence actually shows
• Accreditation decision — who reviews the assessment record and issues or withholds the result

No single individual holds authority over more than one of these three functions for the same facility.

3. Commercial independence

ASF Tourism’s revenue model — Membership & Pricing, honestly still in draft — must never link an assessor’s compensation to a specific facility’s result. No assessor, Coordinator, or Monitor receives any payment, bonus, or benefit contingent on whether a given facility passes. Fees for accreditation services are set independent of outcome and payable regardless of result.

4. Local partner independence

Where ASF works through a local partner organisation (such as a national tour operator association), that partner facilitates and adapts — it does not independently alter scored criteria, and it does not have authority to override an accreditation decision reached through ASF’s process. This mirrors the same model already in place for ASF’s healthcare work with the Public Health Institute of Georgia.

5. What this means in practice

A facility that pays ASF for assessment can still fail. A facility that complains loudly cannot buy a different result. A local partner that wants to see its market succeed cannot soften a finding. These aren’t aspirations — they are the direct, practical output of the structural separation in Section 2 and the compensation rule in Section 3.

6. Related policy

This policy works alongside TOUR-POL-01 Conflict of Interest — independence is the structural guarantee; conflict-of-interest declaration is the individual-level check that confirms it’s holding in a specific case.