Open specification · Public Working Draft
The Service Promise Protocol.
Every business keeps books for money. None keeps books for service. This specification defines the record: a vendor-neutral format and lifecycle for service promises in hospitality, so that any operator can answer four questions from the record alone. What has been promised, who owns each promise, which promises remain outstanding, and which were objectively kept.
The two rules everything else serves
No accepted promise without an accountable owner. No verified close on the sole word of the party that did the work.
A request is not yet a promise: acceptance creates the obligation, fixes its budgets, and assigns exactly one owner. Transfers never reset a clock. Records are append-only, every recorded need reaches a terminal outcome, and a dispute never rewrites a settlement; adjudication records a superseding version while the original stays visible.
An honest vocabulary of outcomes
A record settles as kept, kept late, unverified complete, broken, declined or cancelled, and conformant reporting may never merge the first three into a single completed figure. A system without independent verification can therefore never report anything as kept. Honesty is enforced by vocabulary before it is enforced by audit.
What conformance protects
At every level: pseudonymous guests by default, minimum necessary disclosure, safety-critical needs surfaced at acceptance, worker access to records naming them with a route of appeal, no published individual rankings, and defined retention. Level 3 adds tamper evidence, full portability of records, published verification rules and audit readiness. Certification marks are administered outside the specification and are never conferred by a conformance claim.
Invenio HALO is the reference implementation. The protocol is implementation-neutral: nothing in it requires an API integration at go-live, and a venue's records belong with the operation, not with any vendor.
Comments, implementations and objections are welcome at ahmed@invenioprotocols.com. This document becomes a standard only through adoption, interoperability and credible governance, none of which it claims today.