Only the Good (Things) Die Young

In the past 12 hours I learned that two good things I loved to use have come to an end.

One is the Nando’s loyalty card. The last time they changed their frequent feeder programme, they grandfathered cards from the old system. This time, they don’t.

There is no Nando’s where I live. I only get to eat there when I visit someplace else. It’s a treat. When I happen to have a work contract near a Nando’s, I tend to eat there a lot. But the last time I got the chance was early this year.

Alas, they won’t honour my loyalty cards and don’t have a new one to offer. They want me to put an app on my phone, which will only have enough space for it if I delete some other app—and the apps I have are all things that I use often.

They say they announced this five months in advance—on their website. Their website?! Why would I spend time on their website until I am going somewhere that might bring me close to one of their restaurants?

Long ago in the States (20 years?), a particular service station chain discontinued their loyalty cards and wouldn’t honour them any more. I never bought fuel at one of their stations again. I’ve been known to drive an extra 50 miles and run on fumes to avoid them. We’ll see how long it will be before I dine at Nando’s again. I probably will, but I may not be as eager to go out of my way to reach them as I used to be.

The other good thing that disappeared recently is not a commercial business. It’s the TransportDirect journey planning website. The UK Department for Transport believes other websites now provide equivalent services. They even list those services on the shutdown page.

It isn’t true. Some foolish box-ticker filled out a form and made this decision without actually comparing what TransportDirect did versus what, say, Google does. It was a rare case of a UK government sponsored piece of IT giving better results than anything private operators are offering, so of course they have shut it down as of today.

I’ve relied on TransportDirect since its inception. I have a trip to plan, and I’m unhappy. Without TransportDirect, it is no longer as easy for me to compare a few public transport options versus driving and get all the details—now I have to visit multiple websites and manually pull together the information. And TransportDirect always had a more realistic estimate of driving time than any other journey planner.

The software programmers evidently know better than the box-ticking decision maker. The shutdown page lists purported replacements for pieces of its functionality, and refers people to Traveline to plan journeys on public transport. But at Traveline, if you want to plan a journey door to door on a national basis (not just within one region), guess where it takes you? To the shutdown page for TransportDirect because there is no genuine equivalent for it!

It worked well, so it has been discontinued. Sigh.