Malta International Airport plc - July Traffic Results

On 6 August, Malta International Airport plc published the traffic results for July 2012 revealing a 7.1% increase in passenger movements when compared to the same month last year. The total amount of passengers of 445,232 movements during July 2012 was an absolute record by the company. The previous monthly record was achieved in August 2010 with 427,924 passengers.

The growth in passengers was brought about by a 4.8% rise in aircraft movements and a 5.7% rise in seat capacity when compared to July 2011. MIA reported that the seat load factor also went up by 1.1 percentage point when compared to the same period last year to 85.1%, representing the sixteenth consecutive monthly growth.

The statistics also showed that during July 2012, the highest increase in passengers emanated from the Italian market (+10.2%) closely followed by a 9.7% rise in passenger movements from France. The Spanish (+3.5%) and UK (+2.4%) markets also registered growth whilst passengers from the German market dropped by 1% during the month of July.

January – July 2012

During the first seven months of 2012, passenger traffic grew by 2.8% compared to the same period last year to 2.02 million passenger movements mainly reflecting the record number of passengers recorded in July.  For the first seven months of this year, aircraft movements dropped by 1.4% when compared to the same period in 2011 while seat capacity retreated by 1.5%. On the contrary. the average seat load factor increased by 3.1 percentage points to 76.2%.

In July, MIA also announced that it expects the positive trend in traffic results experienced during the first six months of the year to continue in the second half of 2012. As a result, MIA revised its passenger forecast for 2012 from the initial 2.8% drop to a 1.5% increase which will lead to a new record of 3.56 million passenger movements – the third consecutive annual record.