Flashpackers and Flashpacking

Below is an excerpt from a news article about "flashpackers" and "flashpacking".

The end of the article has a "10 key signs of a flashpacker" list, including "You don't spend all day emailing friends to tell how you hitch-hiked to Paris and saved $12. You're shopping on the Champs Elysees" and "You have a keen eye for media hype, recognise this is all a joke and would cut off your own arm and eat it rather than actually call yourself a flashpacker".

Any thoughts of flashpackers/flashpacking?

Here is the article excerpt:
(I added the bold.)

Flashpacker is a fairly new term. . .used to describe independent travellers who journey in style. It applies to adventurous men and women, usually in their 30s, who have established careers and money to burn. . .
[...]
There is no set amount that flashpackers will budget on accommodation a night. "In Thailand, we paid £5 [$11.80] per night for beautiful seafront cabins, then stopped off in Singapore and stayed at the Fullerton Hotel, one of the most expensive. But the key is choice."

In three months, the couple spent £20,000.
[...]
In Australia, the word has been seized by accommodation chain Nomads World Hotels, which rebranded its backpackers as flashpackers about six months ago.

"We have six properties in Australia and New Zealand and Fiji and our properties were getting better and better," Penny Brand, the company's sales and marketing manager, says. "And backpackers . . . the name just didn't cut it. We have en suite doubles as well as the dorm rooms. Some of our properties have cinema lounges, resort-type pools, air-conditioning."

Coming up with the concept was simple (although Nomads' definition differs from that at Flashpackerdiaries.com). "To us, it was like, it's a flash backpackers, so it's flashpackers!" Brand says. "We have one property that doesn't fit that market - it's called our partypackers."

A double room at a flashpackers costs $70-$95 a night. "We have king, en suite rooms with televisions that go for $95 a night in Melbourne," Brand says. "That price is on par with a lower-end hotel, but you've got a bar with a cafe, wireless internet through the whole reception-bar area, a kitchen, a cinema lounge - facilities a traditional hotel doesn't have."

Nomads aims to offer the social interaction of a backpackers, but with the comforts of a hotel, Brand says.
[...]
Rob Hart, general manager of Flight Centre's Student Flights in Brisbane, has noticed the change in the market. "We're a student flights brand, so we focus on backpackers and students, but the majority of our customers are actually professionals," he says. "There's a greater trend to take career breaks - a lot of corporations are giving people time to actually do that.

"Probably 75 per cent of of the backpackers who come to Australia come from Europe, and a lot of those backpackers are professionals," he says.

"So they can afford to flashpack rather than do it on the ultimate cheap, as, say, an 18-year-old or a gap-year student would do."
[...]
Brand says another trend is that traditional backpackers are getting older.

"Instead of it being an 18 to 25 market, it's a 25 to 40 sort of thing - [including those] taking a gap year off life, or those just married who decide to take a year off before having the kids."

Hart has noticed a similar shift: "We definitely see lots of older people, particularly 30 to 40, who are still doing flashpacking around the world. One trend is that they've been backpackers before, but they are over the sharing of dorms, but they still go to backpackers."