Bonjour, Trip Planner

Narrated

Your trip planner is getting real traction. Users generate itineraries, upload photos, manage trips through proper lifecycle stages. You check your analytics and see something exciting: users from France, Germany, Japan, Brazil. People all over the world are planning trips with your app.

Then you get a message from a user named Marie in Lyon, France. She writes — in English, because she has no choice — “I love your app but I cannot use it well. Everything is in English. The dates are strange. You write 12/25/2024 but in France we write 25/12/2024. I almost booked the wrong day.”

You look at your app through her eyes. Every button says “Generate” and “Share” and “Archive.” The date December 25th shows as 12/25/2024 — which looks like the 25th of December to you, but to Marie it looks like it could be the 12th of the 25th month, which doesn’t exist. Currency shows as $49.99 instead of 49,99 EUR. And when the AI generates her itinerary for Paris, it writes everything in English. Marie speaks English well enough to navigate, but her travel partner doesn’t speak any English at all.

Marie isn’t asking for something exotic. She’s asking for the bare minimum: let me use your app in my language, with my date format, with my currency symbol. The kind of thing every app she uses on her phone already does.

This is the internationalization wall. Your app was built for one language, one date format, one way of writing numbers. The moment someone from another country shows up — and they will, because this is a trip planner, and trip planners are inherently global — everything feels broken.

The good news? This is a solved problem. And as a vibe coder with Claude Code, you have a massive advantage: you can generate translations for dozens of languages in minutes, not weeks.