It’s always good to see how much effort companies put into making sure their international customers are well-served, particularly when they claim to be ambitious, modern and revolutionary.

Take the bizarrely named NS Hispeed which takes over the running of international high-speed train services in the Netherlands from December 7.
Of course Holland will not actually have any high speed train services until next autumn at the very earliest.
In the meantime, the English-language website (cheesy photographs of smiling ‘passengers’ and Dutch bits the translators forgot to translate) is happy to tell us how fabulous it is all going to be.
NS HST (sensibly, they don’t seem very keen on ‘Hispeed’ in the English section) offers a ‘completely new vision on mobility’ and is ‘opening new directions’, says the website.
In the meantime, if you would like to book a (slow) international train ticket, don’t make the mistake of clicking onto the section called ‘travel with us’. This logs you onto a very irritating promotional film with lots of butterflies.
And if you manage to find the right place to book, you will have to do it in Dutch.
Pity the powers that be have not learned a lesson from the high-speed train service itself and delayed the launch of this website until it too had been properly tested.