How important is it to have a rating of 10 on your shops? Does anyone know if the schedulers have an "A" list for offering the best shops to the best shoppers? Does anyone here get shop offers for exotic shops like hotels, spas, cruises, etc.?

As numerous threads will bear out, there are many here who enjoy doing the types of shops that you mentioned, though spas and cruises can be few and far between.

To answer your original question, "yes", the better you are at writing your reports, the more Editors and, subsequently,Schedulers will come to know you and "trust" you to do the more "elaborate" shops.

These people usually get paid per "completed" assignment. Most Editors get about $3-$4, I understand, per report and, supposedly, try to process about 4 reports per hour. The more time they have to spend fixing "errors" in the report, the fewer reports they can process. The less time they can spend on your report, the more reports they can "complete" and their hourly earnings go up.

The shop grade is based on how much time they had to spend editing or correcting your report. The higher your rating, the less time they had to spend on your report, showing that you "know what you are doing" as a shopper.

Each rating is important for your overall shopper rating with that company.
Some MS company editors are pickier than others and you'll get to know this with experience.
If you forget to put something in your report, send an email to the scheduler afterwards with the clarification/addition - I would think it's better that you remember and let them know rather than them coming back to you.

I am new to mystery shopping. Does the company advise you of your rating or do you have to ask? I received a nice email from the editor on my first shop for her,but she did not reveal my score. I receivd a check from a shop that I completed for another company, but no feed back from them.

It is not unusual to not get any feedback or a score. If you don't hear from the Company after sending your report in that is usually a good sign. There are a few Companies that do send you a score but they are few and far between in my experience. If a Company does have to contact you after you submit your report it is usually because they need more information.

The MSPs I work for that use SASSIE give a shop score but, like dquiring stated, no news is usually good news with the others. You're right, though. When you work hard to do your best for a MSP, it's nice to get feedback.

Some MSPs score shops, some don't. Obviously if they score you want higher scores. There are jobs that have as a restriction that you must have a score of 7 or higher (for example), but most of them start you with a 5 and if all their shops have that requirement you need to contact them when there is a shop they really need done pointing out that you would LOVE to take it but having never been able to shop for them you haven't been able to build a record with them yet. I have done this with several as an email to the scheduler who posted the shop or emailed me about it. Just make sure your email is short, to the point and spelling and grammer are all top rate.

As for cruises, spas and hotels, there are a number of them out there. These fall into two categories--the ones where they reimburse your services plus a small fee and the ones where they cover your expenses door to door plus a nice fee. I can stomach only one or two of the latter per month because of the amount of work involved. And yes, I have had some lovely lovely massages in exotic places, but the time frame and depth of the reports leaves you little time to enjoy the visit. It is not uncommon for the one or two night stay to have around 100 pages of checklists with comments and the narrative to run 10 pages or more single spaced. Sometimes these are done solo (where you will always stand out like a sore thumb) other times as couples (where your other half had better be self entertaining because you are working). While the hotel charges are reversed from your credit card (sometimes in a couple of days, sometimes it takes weeks), your out of pocket is likely to run several hundred dollars that you then wait a month or more to be reimbursed.