Urgent memo to hotel marketers: Baby Boomer women spend well over a trillion dollars a year on goods and services and demand your attention. In your efforts to court younger consumers, are you ignoring this key consumer?

A new book, Boom! Marketing to the Ultimate Power Consumer — the Baby Boomer Woman, features essays from authors in the travel industry, including Ed Kinney of Marriott Vacation Club and Best Western's Dorothy Dowling.

Touting “the age of the Baby Boomer Woman,” the book overthrows stereotypes that have rendered women 40-plus “virtually invisible in the past.” Authors Mary Brown and Carol Orsborn work for Imago Creative, a marketing firm that helps companies build brand relationships with Boomer women.

“There are quite simply more of them consuming more products and capable of flexing more combined social, economic and political muscle than any other gender or age segment of the population,” say the authors.

Best Western's Dowling notes research today that shows Boomers are more willing to brand-hop than younger consumers and that there's tremendous diversity within the demographic. To that end, “I want to see marketers give Boomer women products and offers that reflect and enable them to express who they really are,” says Dowling. “This includes acknowledging what is life stage-appropriate while conveying a youthful sensibility. It means creating products with the right mix of image, performance, relevance and simplicity and accommodate and respond to the many demands on her time.”

Attention to Baby Boomers kicked into high gear last winter, when the first of the population bulge born between the years 1946 and 1964 began turning 60, while fighting the traditional stereotypes of aging.