Air Malta (Malta International) will resume scheduled commercial passenger flights from July 1 as Malta International reopens as part of an easing of coronavirus travel restrictions introduced in March.

At the end of May, Malta’s Prime Minister Robert Abela said Malta’s international airport would reopen from July 1 and that the government was continuing to negotiate safe corridors for travel between countries with low rates of coronavirus infection including Luxembourg, Norway, Serbia, Slovakia, Austria, Czechia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Israel.

A week later, on June 6, Air Malta announced that it had launched its safe corridor summer 2020 schedule, with flights to Catania, Frankfurt International, Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin Tegel, Prague Václav Havel, and Luxembourg to start from July 1, and flights to Zurich, and Geneva coming online a week later.

The carrier said it had only been operating ‘lifeline’ flights to London, Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt, and Rome Fiumicino for the last three months but these will continue.

Malta Tourism Authority (MTA) chief executive Johann Buttigieg said in a statement at the beginning of June that “The announcement that Malta International Airport - our primary gateway to the world - is reopening is of fundamental importance to all of us in the tourism sector, and we welcome it with enthusiasm. The difficulties we have managed to overcome together in the past weeks are testament to the resilience of the industry. New challenges lie ahead, but with them come new opportunities. MTA believes that Malta has all it takes to rebuild a profitable industry that provides a livelihood for thousands and is so important to the Maltese economy.”

The reopening is good news for Malta International Airport, which said it saw a 99% drop in passenger numbers in April compared to the same month in 2019 as all inbound commercial flights were banned from the end of March. During April there were 73 repatriation flights to and from eight countries, with 2,370 repatriated passengers handled by the airport.

“While passenger traffic had already decreased significantly in March 2020, the situation at Malta International Airport continued to deteriorate in April, which was the first full month to see air traffic to and from the airport come to an almost complete standstill,” Malta Airport said at the beginning of May.

“Last April, we handled just 2,370 passengers, which is roughly equivalent to the number of passengers usually processed in an hour on a typical day in summer. The road to pre-COVID figures will doubtlessly be a long and hard one, but I am optimistic that if all stakeholders continue to pull the same rope and remain open to taking the necessary measures, customer confidence will gradually be restored and the demand for travel will recover,” said Malta International Airport chief executive officer Alan Borg.