Green coding and hospitality: increasing sustainability in the travel industry is possible (and already real)

Dear WuBookers, today we want to ask you a question: can a software house reduce energy impact and increase sustainability in the hospitality industry?
 The answer – fortunately – is yes, and we at WuBook have developed solutions that go in this direction. The formula we decided to adopt is called green coding and can make a difference in terms of environmental footprint.

What is green coding and why it affects everyone

We are used to hearing about sustainability in many different areas: from organic food to green tourism. And we are increasingly used to thinking that almost everything we do has a positive or negative impact on the environment.

But you may be surprised to learn that even our seemingly immaterial and ‘innocent’ online life has several consequences for our planet’s resources.   

For this reason, the topic of sustainability has recently also invested the technological world, including the Internet.

Infact, the European Commission in its Digital Summit in June 2022 considered that software is in itself green. However, since they need a physical component (the hardware, i.e. devices and servers) to be designed and run, their environmental impact is not zero. Indeed, it is the opposite. According to http archive, the amount of data exchanged online in recent years has grown exponentially: compared to 2010, it has increased by an average of 400% for monitor versions and 1300% for mobile versions. But the more data are sent, the more energy the servers consume. Considering that the amount of information conveyed by the Internet every day is constantly increasing, a conscious approach can make a difference, in terms of energy savings, up to 15-20%.

For this reason, it is good practice to optimise all information exchange processes, from the management of inter-company communications to software development algorithms, in a green coding perspective, thus reducing server effort.
The green coding (or green IT or green computing) is a software developing methodology that takes into account the environmental effects produced by the CO2 emissions of servers and seeks to reduce them upstream, starting with the software itself.
Some of the most common practices of green coding include, for example: the removal of faulty or dead code, which wastes unnecessary energy to be processed; the recycling of code that can be used elsewhere; and continuous review to improve efficiency and speed up response times.

What is green coding in connectivity and the hospitality sector?

Among the best practices of green coding, a programming paradigm called MapReduce has emerged in the last five years, and we at WuBook, who have always been committed to sustainability, have decided to adopt it.

Through MapReduce, WuBook’s Channel Manager clusters large quantities of requests sent to the software, thus reducing ‘calls’ and responses between partner servers and WuBook’s servers by 50 per cent, with a significant impact in terms of carbon neutral servers.

This optimisation of APIs (the interfaces that allow applications to interact with each other), allows a substantial decrease in the overload of data centres (the large data processing centres exchanged online), while still maintaining a transmission speed below 3 minutes and thus guaranteeing high software performance.

In addition to this, WuBook already chooses data centres certified according to the standards of the Green Web Foundation, relying on servers that therefore use 100 per cent renewable energy.

An all-round sustainable company

As confirmed by a recent Booking.com article on eco-friendly companies, these development strategies are constantly being applied not only to the Channel Manager but to all WuBook technology and also to corporate life.

In fact, we have drastically reduced waste production through differentiated collection, the use of coffee beans (thus eliminating non-compostable pods) and, where

it was not possible to prefer reusable tableware, such as ceramic cups, we opted for biodegradable materials.

The very fact that we choose to establish our headquarters in a small town like Fano, allows 70% of WuBook employees to reach their workplace by bicycle, on foot or by train, proving that sustainability is a core value for the entire company.