Malta International Airport hosted more than 1.8 million passengers between November March, an upturn of 17% over the same period last year.

In a notice on the Malta Stock Exchange, the company said that although summer remained the high traffic season, the airport was experiencing increasingly busy winters, mainly resulting from collaborative efforts to promote Malta as a year-round destination.

A monthly passenger profile exercise carried among inbound, non-business travellers showed that, between November and February*, culture and weather were the top two reasons that attracted tourists to Malta. An encouraging 97 per cent added that the island lived up to their expectations.

Growth in passenger movements was registered in parallel with an increase of 16.6% in aircraft movements and an increase of 18.1% in seat capacity; both stemming from an enhanced winter flight schedule offering five new routes and increased frequencies on existing ones.

Seat load factor for the season dropped marginally and stood at 77%.

The company’s top markets were the United Kingdom (+11.6%), Italy (+12.9%), Germany (+14.7%), France (+20.9%), and Belgium (-3.7%), cumulatively accounting for over 1.3 million passenger movements of the airport’s total traffic for the period.

While all winter months experienced double-digit growth, the strongest increase, at 22.5%, was registered in March. The Easter holidays and the launch of a summer schedule offering more than 100 destinations were important contributing factors to the significantly improved performance observed last month.

With summer now having started, Malta International Airport inaugurated 12 new routes operated by different airlines for the season, and will be launching more routes in April. Busier days were expected, but with eight additional check-in desks and a new central security area in operation as part of the company’s terminal reconfiguration project, the airport was in a better position to handle the increase in traffic, MIA said.