“The Covid-19 outbreak is putting aviation and tourism stakeholders across the globe to the test, as passenger demand for air travel plummets and airlines cut capacity across the board,” remarked Malta International Airport CEO Alan Borg in a press release announcing passenger movements for February.

He said “the last week of February at MIA gave us but a small taste of what lies ahead; we are now bracing ourselves for two challenging months.

“To date, seven airlines have already cancelled 278 flights from Italy and other markets,” he said.

This means that 278 to Malta from Italy and other markets have already been cancelled.

Mr Borg went on to highlight that the company’s focus right now is on the safety and wellbeing of its guests, employees working on the airport campus, and the general public.

Air Malta has already suspended daily flight to Milan, while Ryan Air subsidiary Malta Air has suspended flights to Bergamo and Treviso due to the Coronavirus outbreak.

Italy is the country worst effected by the virus out of the entire continent of Europe, impacting 7,300 people on Sunday. Northern regions are now on lockdown.

Traffic through MIA totalled 421,567 passenger movements in February, translating into growth of 17.3 per cent over the same month last year.

The 29th of February provided for an additional day of operations, boosting the month’s total traffic with 16,986 passenger movements.

The top drivers of traffic for the month were the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France and Spain, with all markets, except for Germany (-5.0 per cent), registering varying levels of growth.

Despite February’s overall traffic result being a positive one, seat load factors (SLF), particularly on Italian routes, bore the brunt of the Covid-19 outbreak in Europe and declining travel demand, with significant drops being registered in the last week of the month.

The seat load factor for the month of February, which measures the occupancy of seats available on flights operated to and from Malta International Airport, stood at 75.8 per cent.