Want to hug your loved ones goodbye before they board their flight to a far-flung destination? You might need to set a timer. The countdown is certainly on for travellers at Dunedin airport in New Zealand, where a new sign has been introduced to cap “hug time” at the departures drop-off zone. The longest you can have? A perfunctory three minutes. “For fonder farewells please use the car park,” the sign advises.
There are some practical reasons behind this grim directive. “There’s only so much space we have in that drop-off area and too many people are spending too much time on their fonder farewells [there],” the airport’s CEO Daniel De Bono explained during an interview with Radio New Zealand, in which he also emphasised that longer goodbyes should be consigned to the main car park – and even cited some research suggesting that just 20 seconds of hugging is sufficient to give you an oxytocin and serotonin boost.
