New Zealand airport imposes three-minute limit on hugs

Measure intended to prevent extended embraces from causing traffic jams, but airport won’t have ‘hug police’.

An airport in New Zealand has imposed a three-minute limit on farewell hugs.

The CEO of Dunedin airport, Dan De Bono, said on Tuesday the new regulation was imposed in September to “keep things moving smoothly”. The measure is designed to prevent extended embraces leading to traffic jams at the provincial transport hub.

A sign recently placed in the area of the airport reserved for dropping off passengers reads “Max hug time three minutes”. Those seeking “fonder farewells” should head to the airport’s car park instead, it recommends.

The restriction has polarised social media users, De Bono said, with pictures of it going viral online.

“We were accused of breaching basic human rights and how dare we limit how long someone can have a hug for,” the CEO told The Associated Press news agency. He asserted that others had welcomed the change.

The limit is intended to be a substitute for measures used at other airports which warn of wheel clamping or fines for drivers parked in drop-off areas. Some airports in the United Kingdom impose fees for all drop-offs, however brief.

A sign for the drop-off area is displayed at the Dunedin airport in Momona, New Zealand [File: Sarah Soper/Dunedin Airport via AP]

De Bono said Dunedin’s airport – a modest terminal serving a city of 135,000 people on New Zealand’s South Island – went the “quirky” route.

Three minutes is “plenty of time to pull up, say farewell to your loved ones and move on”, he said. “The time limit is really a nicer way of saying, you know, get on with it.”

The CEO said a 20-second hug alone is enough to release the wellbeing-boosting hormones oxytocin and serotonin.

Anything longer? “Really awkward,” he said.

However, the new time limit will not be strictly enforced beyond telling people to move to the car park.

“We do not have hug police,” De Bono said.