Malta International Airport handles three days worth of passengers over month of January

According to Malta International Airport (MIA)’s monthly traffic report, during the month of January 38,938 passengers travelled through the airport.

This monthly total, it says, is comparable to the traffic handled by the airport over only three days in January 2020.

MIA has started what is set to be another challenging year for the aviation industry with a year-on-year drop of 90.7 per cent in January’s passenger traffic. 

The airport’s weakest traffic result since its reopening in July 2020 comes in the wake of the implementation of new travel bans and more stringent requirements in source markets such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In terms of connectivity, Malta International Airport has continued to suffer, registering significant drops in weekly flight frequencies for January.

Among Malta International Airport’s top airports for the month, Rome Fiumicino was hit hardest, as the 27 weekly flights operated in January 2020 were whittled down to just eight last month.

Changing travel requirements and restrictions also had an impact on overall connectivity, with Malta International Airport’s direct connections being limited to just 28 scheduled routes in January 2021 as opposed to the 99 scheduled routes operated in January 2020.

In December, the Central Bank of Malta issued a warning that Malta had lost nearly half its direct air routes which threatened to cause a major economic impact.

Across Europe, the aviation industry has been badly impacted by COVID.

The Airports Council International recently highlighted that the number of routes European airports have lost since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic was fast nearing the 7,000 mark. 

The same organisation issued a revised passenger traffic forecast for 2021, predicting that air traffic would remain low in the first half of the year and start recovering in the third quarter, subject to the effective roll-out of vaccinations and the partial lifting of existing travel restrictions.