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.