Design and Optimization of an Intercity Travel Booking Platform: A Case Study of FlyNayTrip

The rapid proliferation of mobile internet access across tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India has fundamentally altered the digital travel landscape, creating both an opportunity and a technical challenge for intercity booking platforms. This paper presents the design, development, and systematic optimization of FlyNayTrip, a mobile-first intercity travel booking platform developed as part of an industry internship engagement. The system addresses the unique performance constraints imposed by 2G and 3G network conditions, limited device memory, and heterogeneous browser environments prevalent among its target user base. The platform integrates a React-based frontend, RESTful API communication via Axios, and a structured backend service layer. The core contribution of this work lies in the identification and remediation of critical performance bottlenecks through techniques including route-level code splitting, lazy loading of non-critical components, in-memory and HTTP caching of API responses, and strategic image optimization. Empirical measurements obtained through Lighthouse auditing and field data collection demonstrate significant improvements across Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) decreased from 5.1 seconds to 2.3 seconds, First Input Delay (FID) reduced from 210 ms to 78 ms, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) improved from 0.31 to 0.07. Overall initial page load time was reduced by approximately 57%, and the JavaScript bundle size decreased from 1.82 MB to 0.64 MB following tree-shaking and selective vendor chunk splitting. The booking completion rate improved from 54% to 73%, representing a statistically meaningful uplift in user conversion. The paper further discusses the architectural trade-offs encountered during implementation, the inherent limitations of a student-scale deployment, and prospective directions for future engineering work.