Malta International Airport plc (MIA) on Tuesday announced that its traffic surpassed 2019 passenger numbers last January for the first time since February 2020.

It recorded 379,335 passenger movements during the month, representing a 3.6 per cent increase when compared to the same month in 2019. While this marks a “significant milestone” in the airport’s gradual recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic, the busiest start to a year remains January 2020, when there were 418,096 passenger movements.

Last year, MIA’s full-year traffic stood at 5.8 million passenger movements, with this being 20 per cent below that of 2019, the year it achieved record full-year traffic.

Almost 77 per cent of the seats available on flights operated to and from the airport were occupied during January, indicating a “healthy” demand for travel. However, pent-up demand is expected to start settling as the year wears on.

While MIA was connected to 31 markets during the month, Italy maintained its top spot with 85,618 passenger movements, while the United Kingdom ranked second with 58,836, followed by France, Poland, and Germany.

The German market, which has been relatively slow when it comes to its recovery, dropped to fifth after losing out to Poland. While more seat capacity was deployed on German routes, a significant difference in the seat load performance of 92 per cent for Poland and 77 per cent for Germany resulted in the former overtaking the latter by 695 passenger movements.