I booked a well-deserved holiday this month and conducted all of my destination research online. How antiquated the thought of browsing through dog-eared brochures in a High St. travel agency now feels. Online I was able to search on price and location, view videos of possible accommodation, read reviews from other travellers – everything but dip a toe in the pool.

However, one common niggle kept distracting me like a persistent Mediterranean mosquito. Too many websites offered inadequate translations.

The language choice would be given – click the union jack for an English version. But once clicked, the resulting text read as if written by a Spanish waiter who’d learned English from touring stag parties. And that was just the French websites!

I have no doubt that many UK holiday companies are just as poor in this respect as their European counterparts. In fact, I wonder how many even offer a translation? And yet, in a world made smaller by faster, cheaper travel, what price this fudging of the language issue? How much lost business results?

Badly written English certainly made me feel less confident about spending my money with the holiday operators in question. I imagine foreign tourists feel the same about the English equivalents. At a time when every business is fighting tooth and nail for market share, surely it’s not too much trouble to find a native-language speaker to check and double-check text?

Once again, it all comes down to content. You might have the finest product known to man. But if the words you use to describe it are poor, your sales will undoubtedly suffer.

Now, where did I put those Speedos…