Buitenland Loket is the Dutch name of the company that also goes by Captain Waypoint everywhere else in the world. Same team, same mission, one origin story.
In Dutch, buitenland means “abroad” and loket is the little counter window at a public building. Put together: the friendly desk you walk up to when life crosses a border.
Buitenland Loket was founded by a small Dutch team with first-hand experience of living, working, and eventually coming home from abroad. We know how overwhelming rules, procedures, and unfamiliar situations can feel when your life crosses borders, and how good it is when someone thinks alongside you and actually answers your questions.
We started Buitenland Loket as a digital front desk: friendly, approachable, and honest. Not yet another helpdesk you have to wrestle with, but a real counter that listens. The kind of place where it is fine to ask a “small” question, because we know those small questions rarely are.
Not long after launching, we noticed two things at the same time.
The headache of living across borders, getting lost in portals, chasing forms, and piecing information together is something anyone abroad recognizes, whether they are from Amsterdam, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, or Seoul.
As much as we love the name, we quickly realized it is hard to say, hard to remember, and hard to explain outside the Netherlands. An international platform needed an international name.
The international version of the same idea: a guide for cross-border life. Same team, same principles, same friendly counter, now built to work for people from any country, living in any country, in six languages and counting. Buitenland Loket remains our name in the Netherlands, our origin and home market. Everywhere else, we go by Captain Waypoint.
