Malta International Airport said today that it handled 373,610 passengers in September, a record for the month.

The increase in passenger movements, when compared to the same month last year, reached 15.4%.

Seat capacity in the same month was 498,243, an increase of 11.5% over September 2009.

In September, aircraft movements grew by 11.7% over the corresponding period last year, whilst the average seat load factor also increased by 2.5 percentage points to reach 75.0% - up from the 72.5% registered in September 2009.

Cargo and mail were 20% lower than that recorded during the same month in 2009.

The French, Spanish and Italian markets grew significantly in September, by 43.8%, 34.8% and 32.6% respectively, whereas Germany recorded a more modest increase of 5.9%. The UK was the only core market that registered a decline in passenger numbers during September - passenger movements were 1.9% less than last year.

The results for the first nine months of the year, in terms of passenger movements, showed an increase of 12.4% when compared to the same period last year, totalling 2,584,305 passenger movements.

"The strong increase of 9.6% in seat capacity was the main driver of this result, whilst the average seat load factor improved by 1.7 percentage points reaching 71.4% for the period January to September 2010," MIA said.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.