Accor has earmarked Euros 225 million over the next five years to fund a company-wide digital transformation which covers guests, staff and hotels.
The plan was launched in Paris this morning, and the materials available online go into an unusually comprehensive level of detail.
In fact, at the end of the presentation, which was web cast live, an Accor exec said:
"I wish I had this level of information on my competitive set. We have no hesitation in being transparent. [Our competitors] now need to explain what they are doing."
As usual, the Q&A following the presentation unearthed some additional off-message insight.
Accor shared that Google Hotel Finder, for example, was "delivering customers at a slightly lower cost than the OTAs" and that there was a "deep, engineer-to-engineer relationship between Accor and Google" which looked into how best to use Google products such as Maps, Now and Glass.
Accor refused to be drawn on questions about how Hotel Finder is impacting Google's relationships with its OTAs, other than saying that Google is "walking a fine line between its profitable business relationship with OTAs and its overall ambition of being the most efficient place to access information on the web."
As an aside, Accor said that it was "not against the OTAs as they have given us customers we would not have got otherwise...We are happy to pay for the customer, but only once."
At the heart of this digital transformation is a mobile first approach, with Accor wanting half of its direct bookings to come via mobile within five years. This will be driven by an app - slated for launch in 2015 - which Accor claims will aggregate all touch points into one screen.
It will also attempt to break new ground by allowing guests to book their restaurant through the app as well.
Accor will take partnership approach for the transformation. This ranges from Google, mentioned above, to Microsoft, which puts Xboxes into the lobbies of certain hotels.
But the partnerships also include new businesses and start-ups. Accor works closely with the Innovation Factory in Paris, running hacks with students and professionals.
One recent project was "the connected house-keeping cart" - trying to optimise the way in which housekeepers attend to rooms.
And it has money to spend. Accor has bought Wipolo, a web and mobile platform which managing trip itineraries, linking them with Facebook and Twitter.
Wipolo was featured as a TLabs Startup back in June 2011.
The press release highlights the key points in what is clearly a significant move for the hotel giant, while the 74-page presentation goes into detail about where Accor is at, where it want to be and how it plans to get there.
NB: the live video feed of the presentation went down during broadcast, which is why the quotations have not been attributed to an un-named Accor executive.