‘Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world,’ Hugh Grant famously offered in the heartwarming opening scene of Love, Actually, ‘I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport.’ It’s just as well he doesn’t think about Dunedin airport in New Zealand. The airport’s chief executive, Daniel De Bono, seems not to be a fan of lingering emotion-packed arrivals and departures taking place at his modest transport hub.
While other airport chiefs look for new ways to limit their terminals’ designated smoking areas or swoop on blameless travellers with too many toiletries, De Bono is cracking down on lingering hugs at his terminal here in New Zealand.
Announcing his airport’s recently redesigned drop-off area, De Bono said the airport has imposed a three-minute limit on all farewell embraces.
Max hug time three minutes,’ the airport’s new sign reads. ‘For fonder farewells please use the car park’
‘Max hug time three minutes,’ the airport’s new kerbside sign reads. ‘For fonder farewells please use the car park.’
De Bono, a self-described ‘hugger’, told the Associated Press that the new limit is simply intended to be a substitute for familiar measures used at many other airports around the world which warn of wheel clamping or fines for drivers pushing the time limits in drop-off areas.
In the UK, of course, you’re generally looking at a fiver for even the briefest of airport stops. The Dunedin airport isn’t stinging people with similar fees, its operator points out, opting instead for this altogether more ‘quirky’ route to keep the operation a little less boisterous. Still, it has attracted a tsunami of media coverage in recent days.
‘It’s caused quite a stir,’ he told Radio New Zealand. ‘We’ve got quite a bit of conversation going.’
‘We were accused of breaching basic human rights and how dare we limit how long someone can have a hug for,’ he admits, quickly adding that others have supported what De Bono now describes as ‘a bit of fun’.
With or without mandatory caps on cuddles, many other airports in New Zealand don’t lend themselves to overlong goodbyes, either.
Auckland, the country’s largest, lacks the layout to accommodate anything but the quickest of pecks at either of its crazy-busy terminals. In Wellington, drop off charges already apply, supposedly after ten minutes, but in reality less than that as the limit includes time navigating the sometimes baffling lanes snaking around the terminal.
More to the cultural point, Dunedin – a small city of 130,000 settled in the 1840s by missionaries from the Free Church of Scotland looking to establish a puritan-minded new community in which ‘piety, rectitude and industry’ would prevail – isn’t a notably huggy sort of place in the first place. In such a straitened location, might this latest measure be a solution in search of a problem?
The latest announcement also raises other questions yet unresolved. How, for example, will the airport even monitor the new edict? What constitutes an actual hug? And what about travellers who retreat to the carpark for the permitted ‘fonder’ clinch only to find things getting a little out of hand?
While Dunedin airport mulls over these questions, other local airports have been quick to distance themselves from the measure.
A spokesman from Christchurch airport, located a few hundred miles north of Dunedin, told the news site Stuff that ‘for Kiwis, farewells, and hellos, are all about cherishing those moments, whether it’s a quick squeeze or a long embrace’. It will not be tweaking any of its regulations.
Nor will Auckland airport, which notes that 91 per cent of local air travellers say they feel more comfortable hugging at airports than they do with physical displays of affection in any other public setting. Sounds like the sort of rejoinder Hugh Grant might embrace, too.
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