Most getaways are short, local trips. 71Miles is a growing network of travel sites focused exclusively on regional travel, nothing else.

We cover weekend destinations within driving distance of major metropolitan areas—Northern California and Washington DC Metro today, and additional regions in the coming months. Our authoritative destination guides cover sights, activities, and hotel and restaurant reviews, written by local experts with decades of travel-writing experience for publications such as Lonely Planet, Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Fodor’s, National Geographic Traveler, and Sunset.

But you can expect the writing at 71Miles to be different. We’re pairing our writers’ expertise with the benefits of a blog—uncompromising opinion, fast turnaround times, and daily interaction with readers. Rounding out our destination coverage are interactive maps, slide shows, and events calendars.

Then there are the hotel deals. This is how we make money. Through our partnership with Kayak.com we’re able to provide real-time pricing and availability for thousands of hotels, inns, and B&Bs, within the context of our content. Kayak’s new hotel API (a product we were lucky to get our hands on first) allows us to do this. We also provide hotels the opportunity to purchase links on our site. Through these partnerships, our goal is to present you the best possible hotel prices in a way that’s useful and relevant.

Things are changing fast in the media world, so we tried to make good use of the platforms and technologies that are driving the changes. We’ve managed to keep expenses low and the engineering cycle short by bringing several pre-existing components together. The nuts and bolts of our site start with WordPress, which is our foundation and content management system. We extended WordPress to manage our incoming feeds: we use Google Calendar for the events calendar, map, and mobile product (coming soon); Kayak for our hotel deals; Feedburner to optimize our site feed and to manage our email newsletter; Brightcove for our videos; and of course, the ubiquitous Google Maps API.

We also just launched a Facebook application called Trazzler, a quiz for discovering your unique travel personality.

Adam Rugel - 71Miles Founder
Adam started working in media at age 14, sitting shotgun in the “Music Machine” – WAVA/105.1’s giant radio boom box, pulled by a Chevy Van. Adam found his way online in 1995 when he landed at AOL in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just a few miles from his hometown of Reston. Adam eventually moved out to San Francisco with AOL Travel in 1998, where he managed AOL products with partners like Travelocity, WorldRes, Travel + Leisure magazine, and Six Flags. In 2002, Adam left AOL and co-founded Serotonin Productions, a video-production company specializing in travel videos and interactive projects like Bargain Travel Minute, Hostel Days, and Meet Your Match Online. Most recently, Adam was Director of Business Development for two Bay Area startups: first Audiofeast, then Odeo. As a traveler, Adam has been to far-flung places like Turkey, Cuba, and Russia, and he loves local jaunts to Bay Area spots like Carmel Valley, Bodega Bay, and Santa Cruz too.

Email Adam or call 323-632-6115 for inquiries about business development.

John A. Vlahides – Co-founder and Editor A native New Yorker, John lives in San Francisco, where he writes about travel in California and the west. He is a former luxury-hotel concierge and member of the prestigious Les Clefs d’Or, the Paris-based union of the world’s elite concierges. He speaks French fluently and holds a degree in classic French cooking from La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris, where he worked as an interpreter and studied with the same chefs who trained Julia Child.

John’s work has been published by Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Condé Nast, Sunset, San Francisco, Out Traveler, Genre Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, Miami Herald, and the New York Times. On television, he formerly co-produced a quick-vacations travel segment, called “One Night Stands with John Vlahides,” on San Francisco’s KRON 4 News Weekend. He has appeared as a travel expert on CNN Live Today, ABC7’s View from the Bay, as well as on various international and local radio programs, including Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC Overnights and the Bay Area’s KFOG Morning Show.

When not talking travel, John sings tenor with the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus, one of the few full-season symphony choruses in America. He spends his free time downhill-skiing and hiking the Sierra, touring the West Coast by motorcycle, and sunning on the beach beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

Email John

See clips of John’s TV appearances

Follow John on Twitter

Adam Weller - Lead Developer and Co-Founder
Adam has been working in data-driven web design and development since 1998; for the last seven years, with a global web-hosting provider in system operations, development, and QA. He works in Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and C#, as well as database design and programming in Sybase, MYSQL, Oracle and MSSQL.

At 71Miles, Adam tries to use open source and open standards technologies whenever possible. The current web application framework is PHP / MYSQL running on Apache 2.2 and Linux. - a setup that was mostly predetermined by secting WordPress for our content management system. The 71Miles events and map points come from parsing Google Calendar feeds using MagpieRSS, the Zend Framework and the Dojo Toolkit. The Kayak hotel data is obtained via a Ruby client and Kayak’s XML API (and asynchronously via Dojo).

In his free time, Adam surfs the warm water of South Florida almost every day (weather permitting). Geography permitting, he is also an avid snow skier. Adam grew up in Reston, Virginia.

Buzzword update (Wed Sep 5 17:34:28 EDT 2007):

Added a rails application server to the mix. Making use of ActiveRecord Migrations for db maintenance, exposing event data to the map in json (soon to be kml) and to provide a framework so we can use BackgroudRB to manage our api calls (e.g., kayak, gcal)…

Email Adam