Ryainair on Wednesday announced its biggest summer schedule of flights from Malta, with 26% more flights than last year.

New in the summer schedule are flights to Baden, East Midlands, Memmingen, and Stockholm - all destinations which the low cost airline had flown to from Malta before or had already announced.

The services on the 66 summer routes include increased frequencies on 20 popular routes including Barcelona, Ciampino, Catania, Milan, Valencia, and Vienna.

The airline, which has six aircraft based in Malta, will operate 470 weekly flights and plans to carry 3.5 million passengers to/from Malta this year.

The airline announced a special limited time fare of just €29.99 for travel between April and October on flights to Baden, East Midlands, Memmingen, and Stockholm. There will be once weekly flight to the East Midlands and Baden and twice weekly to the other two.

"The introduction of new routes further demonstrates Ryanair’s commitment to support inbound tourism from key markets and offer the Maltese improved connectivity across Europe," the airline said. 

The CEO of the Malta Tourism Authority, Carlo Micallef, welcomed the expanded schedule.

“Following a successful 2022 which saw tourism recover to 2.3 million arrivals in a year which had commenced facing the challenges and restrictions of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, we are looking forward to an even stronger recovery during 2023 which should get us very close to 2019 record results. This positive attitude is underpinned by strong airline capacity increases both in terms of numbers of routes and in terms of frequencies. Ryanair and its Maltese subsidiary Malta Air are important contributors to this surge in airline connectivity," he said.