linking to the actual thing (TAP Air Portugal)

For all the failures of the web, and the failures of the architects of the web, sometimes it's just the fault of the people using it.

The web allows individual items to be addressed.

In an email from Tap Air Portugal, the airline where it takes four days of solid administrative activity to purchase a ticket, they announce their web page for finding out travel restrictions about your destination.

Since this message is in connection with a specific flight, with Tap Air Portugal knowing the destination (as well as, hopefully, place of departure), how should they do this?  Putting the information in the email itself isn't it, because, as they say themselves, "Each country defines and updates their rules frequently".

From the user point of view, it would be nice to have a link to specific information about entering the particular country where the flight arrives, from the place where the flight departed.  This would solve the majority of cases.  It can have a form, so that passengers with more complex itineraries can research them.

Instead of this, TAP Air Portugal links to a general top-level page about restrictions.  There's a feed-like list of updates about various countries, none of which are in the itinerary.  And there's a form, with no defaults set, for the user to enter their places of departure and arrival, and a date range.  Someone who's just spent 5 days trying, and failing, to book tickets, may be prone to several overlapping attacks from post-traumatic stress disorder, being confronted with yet another form, for the same information, yet again.  At the least, they are likely to experience a mild headache, and some kind of deep pain anticipation, about the as-yet unknown quirks and dysfunctions of this particular date selector, and these particular airport selectors.https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-tap-only-airline-with-degenerate.html

So much for the user point of view.  How might it look inside a competent company, to arrive here?  There might be someone, perhaps going by the grandiose title "Information Architect", but there might be someone who gets to say "the space under /cr on our main web site, meaning https://www.flytap.com/cr, previously unallocated, is now allocated to information about covid restrictions.  Under this, a two-letter lower-case country code shows current information about entering that country, where we support it, and an airport code in caps shows current information about entering that destination, and one of those things with a dash then another those things shows current information about entering that destination from that departure point, and some other stuff, but that's the main things".

Then there's a team that makes that happen, and it's not hard, because they're already making a general form to query, and those things from the Information Architect can be thought of as shortcuts into particular completions of that form.

And then the URL sent to me is https://www.flytap.com/cr/GIG-LIS, or something along those lines, and they can be so proud of that URL that they show the URL in the link, instead of hiding it behind an anchor text of "webpage", and then he woke up, and it was all a dream.