Nearly four and a half million passengers are expected to be handled by Malta International Airport this year, two per cent above last year’s record.

MIA said last year’s 4,290,304 passenger movements were expected to increase to 4.4 million.

The growth was the result of higher capacity being deployed to Malta by operating airlines and also because of a number of new airlines and routes including Aegean, Finnair, Jet2.com and Swiss, MIA said.

Passenger movements last year grew by 6.4 per cent over 2013, which had seen just over four million passengers.

Aircraft movements were up by 4.8 per cent, resulting in an equal increase in seat capacity.

There was a big drop of nearly 26 per cent in traffic from Spain

Apart from more available flights and seats to and from Malta, airlines reported higher seat load factors, meaning that, on average, airliners were fuller than in 2013 – rising from 78.5 per cent to 79.7 per cent.

MIA experienced unprecedented passenger numbers from its four major markets last year: the UK (6.1 per cent), Italy (12.1 per cent), Germany (3.2 per cent) and France (17 per cent).

There was a big drop of nearly 26 per cent in traffic from Spain, the fifth largest market, because of the weakening demand in Spanish outbound leisure tourism.

“It has been a great year for MIA and the tourism industry. The record growth every month shows that the island’s strategy to attract more traffic in the shoulder months is reaping results” ad interim CEO Alan Borg said.

Considering the closure of Libya and the tensions in Russia, he said the numbers were all the more significant.

He praised Air Malta for mitigating such impact by successfully redeploying its capacity and recovering most of the traffic that had been lost.

MIA plans to invest €4 million in projects this year. These include improvements to the runway, apron and taxiway (€950,000), expansion of the terminal building in the non-Schengen arrivals section (€2 million), a new emergency operations centre (€100,000), a reorganisation of the high voltage network (€520,000) and investment in back-up standby power generators (€450,000).