Malta’s International Airport (MIA) is forecasting it will break all records for passenger movements this year.

Ending 2012 with a 4.1 per cent increase over the previous year, the company’s chief executive officer, Markus Klaushofer, said a number of airlines have confirmed they will add routes or start new operations to Malta.

This boosts expected passenger movements in 2013 to 3.7 million.

“Business in Malta is looking very good despite the economic problems in the rest of the EU. We are managing to attract new business to Malta and our prospects look very positive,” Mr Klaushofer, who has helmed MIA for the past year, told a press conference yesterday.

A total of 3,649,979 passengers passed through the airport in 2012, which was an increase of almost 150,000 from 2011.

Seat load factor, a very important aspect in the aviation business, increased by 2.3 per cent over the previous year – aircraft flying in and out of Malta managed, on average, to fill 78 per cent of their seats. Cargo and mail also rose by 1.6 per cent.

Air Malta remained the airport’s most important client even though it registered a drop of one per cent in passengers, basically due to lower capacity as a result of the ongoing restructuring.

Its share of total traffic in 2012 stood at 45.5 per cent, more than two per cent lower than in 2011.

Low-cost airlines continued to increase their share last year, hitting 36.4 per cent, with Ryanair carrying a quarter of all passengers coming to Malta.

London-Gatwick remained the most important route, with more than 250,000 passengers flying to and from Malta. Frankfurt and Rome followed.

MIA’s data shows that while aviation traffic continued to increase by an average of eight per cent in the peak summer months, problems remained in the winter as airlines resisted increasing their capacity between January and March, despite MIA incentives to write off landing charges.

“It is very difficult to convince airlines to increase their presence in winter. We are trying and will continue but this is extremely difficult,” Mr Klaushofer said.

This year, Ryanair will introduce routes to Liverpool, Bergamo and Gothenburg, while Monarch will start operating to East Midlands.

For the first time, Air Baltic will fly in from Riga while Lufthansa will increase the frequency on its Frankfurt route.