Your mum has just spent three hours making you a packed lunch you will not eat. Your dad has driven you to the airport at dawn. The moment has arrived: that sacred final hug before security, the one where someone always cries a little and pretends they are not crying.
That moment now costs a tenner.
Two of Britain’s busiest airports have hit the £10 kiss-and-cry tax — a fee so perfectly calibrated it feels less like a parking charge and more like a toll on human emotion itself. The airports, naturally, call this “drop-off parking.” What they mean is: you may now purchase the right to say goodbye without circling the car park like a vulture for twenty minutes while your family weeps into their phones.
The genius of this is how it reframes inconvenience as premium service. You are not being charged because airports have discovered they can monetise every human moment. You are being offered an experience. A luxury. A curated emotional transaction.
Previously, saying goodbye to someone you loved was free. It was just something you did, standing by a kerb, blocking traffic, letting your feelings happen in public like some kind of medieval peasant. Now you can afford to do it properly — to linger, to hold on just a fraction longer, to let your mum adjust your collar one more time without a traffic warden’s whistle in your ear.
The cost has risen a third in recent years. Which means airports have been slowly, methodically raising the price of human connection, one pound at a time, until we stopped noticing. By the time we looked up, goodbye had become a paid service tier.
At least when the government taxes you, they pretend it is for roads.