Nick’s weekly JetBlue 25 for 25 update: 6 airports down, shark teeth found

Over the next few weeks, my family will be traveling extensively on JetBlue as we pursue the 25 for 25 promotion in our attempt to fly into 25 JetBlue destinations by the end of 2025. I don’t intend to post about each place we visit simply because we’ll be on the move often and not spending a ton of time in each destination. However, I hope to post weekly  updates with quick hits about where we went, stayed, and anything else of interest. These updates will probably mostly come out on weekends, but I wanted to share the update from this past weekend before it gets too far behind me.

Quick tip: Follow Frequent Miler on Instagram to follow live

If you’d like to check out what we’re up to over the course of August with this thing, you’ll want to follow Frequent Miler on Instagram. We’ll regularly be posting story updates and reels explaining what we’re up to, so if you’re curious, check there for the most current info once we kick off again this weekend.

Friday, July 25-27, 2025: Hartford (BDL) to Fort Myers, Florida (RSW), West Palm Beach (PBI) to Hartford (BDL). Airports #5 and #6.

After having flown to Florida, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas last week to pick up our first four airports (TPA, SJU, STT, and HPN), we went to Florida this weekend to pick up Fort Myers on the way down and Hartford, CT on the way back up.

Quick hits from the trip:

Success continues with JetBlue Even More seats at check-in

After scoring Even More Space seats at check-in on both the way to Fort Myers and the way back to Hartford, we are now 9/10 on getting an entire extra legroom row + 1 seat either on the opposite aisle or in the row immediately behind. That Dunkin’ flight has paid off nicely!

We did run into a bit of bad luck on the return journey as one of the seatbelts in the row where my wife and son were sitting was broken (something that hadn’t been previously reported). Maintenance boarded several times to fix it, but didn’t have the right part. We lucked out in that another passenger never showed up, so we were able to shuffle around. My 7-year old sat in the seat behind my wife with a nice couple and I sat across the aisle. They weren’t seats that we would have picked, but it worked out fine for a flight that isn’t that long anyway. The crew handled it well and offered snack boxes for my kids.

The Escape Lounge at Hartford (BDL) is currently closed for renovations

This was a big time disappointment on departure as we’ve been in this lounge before and I was certainly counting on it for a cup of coffee and bite to eat before the flight. I got a peek inside as a construction worker entered and I’d guess that the renovation is closer to the beginning than the end. Someone on Instagram said they heard something about a September reopening. We’ll see, but if you’re flying from Hartford, don’t count on this lounge. On the bright side, maybe it’ll be bigger when it reopens? I noted that this lounge was tiny on previous visits.

Do note that the Dunkin’ in this terminal does not take the Dunkin’ app for payment. Don’t wait until after you’ve ordered to find that out so you won’t end up paying full airport price for Dunkin’ coffee like I did.

I rented from Hertz and lived to tell the tale

Hertz has gotten earned plenty of bad press in recent years. From getting people wrongfully arrested to exorbitant repair costs with the new AI scanners, they seem intent on making people dislike them.

Nonetheless, I’ve had mostly good experiences with Hertz in recent years. That continued this weekend.

I booked a one-way midsize car rental with Hertz from Fort Myers airport (RSW) to Palm Beach (PBI) through Priceline for $79.16 all-in for two days. I booked via Priceline because of a Capital One Shopping offer for 29.5% back. I expected that would be on the pre-tax price of $51.98 and it was. I see the rewards pending in my Capital One Shopping account.

That’s a net cost of somewhere between $63.85 and $79.16 depending on how much you value the Capital One Shopping rewards. I was happy enough with that.

Because I have Hertz President’s Circle status thanks to being an authorized user on my wife’s Venture X account, we picked off of the President’s Circle lot. We picked a Buick Enclave for its relatively nice-sized touchscreen display for navigation purposes and we were happy enough with the car. No issues at pick up or drop off.

Holiday Inn Express & Suites Nokomis, FL

When my wife agreed to this trip, one of her parameters is that we needed to get to southwest Florida in search of shark teeth. My wife loves sharks and despite always keeping her eyes peeled for teeth on just about every beach we visit, she had never found one. Southwest Florida is known to have an abundance.

We picked this hotel for proximity to Venice Beach, FL, which is known to be a potential hotspot.

Despite the many times I have said that I prefer not to book hotels via online travel agencies, I booked this stay via Priceline. The reason for that was because I had a targeted Capital One Shopping offer for 29.5% back on Priceline hotels. That return was too much to ignore, particularly considering the fact that this is a hotel where everybody gets free breakfast and there would be no measurable elite benefit. I’m not chasing IHG Milestone rewards, so I was fine with trading away elite credit for an expected ~$26 back on a stay that cost a total of $107.97 (I’m estimating $26 based on the price before tax).

The hotel was fine — nothing notably good or bad about it.

Instacart credits come in handy

Just the day before this trip, I finally made it a point to get my various credit cards added for monthly Instacart benefits. We have a few cards in my household with $20 monthly Instacart promotional credits and quite a few that offer $10 in monthly promotional credits. See this post for more details.

That came in handy as we wanted to go to the beach in search of shark teeth, but we didn’t think to bring any towels! Target and Instacart to the rescue.

I ended up about $10 out of pocket to have four beach towels delivered within an hour. I ordered just before we went downstairs for breakfast and they arrived before we had the room packed up. That worked out well.

The hunt for shark teeth: Manasota Beach > Venice Beach

We went looking for shark teeth at both Venice Beach, FL (less than 10 minutes from our hotel) on Friday afternoon and on Manasota Beach (about 20 minutes from our hotel) on Saturday morning after leaving our hotel. We found a couple of teeth on Venice Beach, but there is no doubt that Manasota is where it’s at if you’re looking for shark teeth.

And everybody knows it. Manasota Beach was crammed full of people looking for shark teeth. They were all so much better prepared than we were. Everybody comes with sifters, walks in about waist/chest deep, and just grabs handfuls of stuff from around their feet to dump into the sifters. Some bring baskets and dig from the area about ankle/knee deep and dump it in the sifters. I saw elderly folks on beach chairs sifting. Everybody is looking for teeth.

And everybody finds them. I am not at all a shark expert, but on my first or second handful from the ocean floor, I simply sifted through on the palm of my hand and found a fossilized shark tooth.

Everything we found was very small (my wife would have loved to have found something larger), but nonetheless it was cool finding fossilized teeth that the Internet tells me are likely 10,000 years old or more.

If you’re going to do this, you want some sort of sifter and you want an empty plastic bottle you can use to put the teeth in as you find them so that you don’t have to constantly walk back and forth to your bag on the beach (ask me how I know).

My kids and wife had a blast doing this for a couple of hours (and the relatively strong tide but shallow area near the shore meant that my kids also had a lot of fun getting bashed by mini waves, though beware that there was a bit of a rip tide, so exercise caution).

Manasota Beach has easy facilities in terms of restrooms / space to change, so once we were done, we changed into dry clothes and hopped in the car to drive across to the eastern coast of Florida as our flight home was from Palm Beach airport.

Driving across Florida on 74: Get your snacks, gas, and drinks before you head across

One thing that kind of surprised me was just how relatively desolate most of the drive from the west coast of Florida to the East Coast of Florida was in this area. No gas stations, no coffee shops — we mostly didn’t pass anything for the better part 2 hours. We should have probably stopped for a snack or something before heading across the state.

The drive itself was very easy, but I think we were all starving for the last 45 minutes of this drive. Thankfully, we started with relatively full water bottles. I had intended to order some snacks via Instacart (to use up another promotional credit or two) for this drive, but I forgot. Next time!

Dinner: Tropical Smokehouse (Palm Beach) via InKind

For dinner for most of us, I picked up some good barbecue from Tropical Smokehouse in Palm Beach. I found this place on the InKind app because I had some InKind credit to use (thanks to readers who have used my referral link to sign up when we post the occasional gift card deals). The chef is apparently James Beard-recognized and the sign out front says that it was named one of the 50 best barbecue spots in the US by Southern Living magazine. That was good enough to get me to use my InKind credit!

It didn’t disappoint. I wouldn’t say it was the best barbecue I’ve ever had, but it was solid. The sauce, though, was top notch, which made for a very tasty meal.

Note that when you use InKind credit to pay your bill, whether gift card balance or referral credit, you must still pay the tip with a credit card, even if your balance exceeds the cost.

Saturday night: The hotel that shall not be named

When we arrived at our hotel for the night on Saturday, my wife asked if this was our hotel. I looked at it, and if you’re looking at the photo above, you’ll understand why I said, “I don’t know.”

There was literally no name/branding at all.

Funny enough, that continued on the front door. If you’re a frequent traveler, you can probably guess the brand from the outline….but like, where’s the logo?

Above the front desk, it said, “Welcome to the Sunshine State”. No mention of the name of the hotel.

I almost laughed out loud at breakfast. If it weren’t already yellow and white, I might have thought that they just ran out of budget to print logos in color.

So yeah, we stayed at that hotel at Palm Beach Airport. Since the price was only $130 for the night, I intended to use Hilton quarterly credits to cover this stay. Unfortunately, I inadvertently left our Business Platinum cards at home and the check-in agent wouldn’t let me put the charge on a card in my name since we had booked the hotel in my wife’s name, so I couldn’t use my quarterly Hilton Business card credit, either. Annoying, but I know we’ll get another chance or three to use them, so not the end of the world.

I’m hopeful though that my wife will get both the 1,000 bonus points from the current Hilton quarterly promotion and 5,000 points because she booked the day through Hilton for Business, so we should end up earning 6,000 bonus points plus around 3,000 based on the paid rate for a total of 9,000 points (worth around $45). That’s not bad. And hey, we did get Diamond member parking.

Up next: 7 more airports from this Sunday to next Sunday

We’ve now completed 6 airports as a family (I actually have one more than the rest of my family because of the Dunkin’ flight — they’ll pick up Orlando later). We’ll be heading out this coming Sunday and then be traveling nonstop until nearly the end of August. We’ll pick up 7 airports in the first 7 days.

If everything goes according to plan, the rest of my family will hit their 15th airport on August 12th (which will actually be my 16th), so I’m hopeful that we’ll be a collective 600,000 TrueBlue points richer sometime not too long thereafter. By the end of the month, we’ll hit #20 and expect to have earned a collective 1.4 million JetBlue TrueBlue points. Then, we intend to pick up the final 5 airports on previously-planned trips later this year to ensure Mosaic 1 status for all of us for 25 years.

As a reminder, I set out with an intention to mostly use Amex Membership Rewards points for this trip. I’ve actually mixed a number of booking methods and will eventually report on full costs of completing the challenge, though at the core we have used several hundred thousand Membership Rewards points to book much of the journey. We’ve done so using my wife’s Amex Business Platinum card (which she got by strategically upgrading a Business Gold card) with JetBlue as her chosen airline for the 35% pay-with-points rebate that offers up to 1 million points back annually and effectively makes points worth a bit over 1.5c per point on your chosen airline. While the ability to use this benefit on other airlines in business and first class will end in September 2025, it will continue to be possible to use points at greater than 1.5c per point in value for your chosen airline with this feature.

I’ll report out on full flight and hotel costs at the end of the trip for those curious, but I’ll continue to share snippets like this on the weekends during the trip. Also follow Frequent Miler on Instagram for updates about where we are and what we’re doing during the trip. If you see us in an airport / lounge / hotel / the wild, feel free to come say hello!

Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.