THE number of passengers flying through Liverpool John Lennon Airport (LJLA) rocketed by 5% last month.

During October, more than 467,000 passengers travelled through LJLA - an increase of more than 22,000 compared to the previous year.

Figures for 2018 show that there have been 135,000 additional travellers this year.

Some of the most popular destinations included a mix of holiday resorts and European capital cities including Alicante, Malaga, Palma, Rome, Dublin, Amsterdam and Paris.

Queue times for passengers to go through airport security continued to remain low throughout October too with 99% of all passengers taking an average of 10 minutes to pass through security.

Last month saw five new services start from Liverpool to Cluj, Iasi and Bucharest with Wizz Air, to Paphos with Ryanair and to Toulouse with easyJet, in addition to Ryanair announcing new routes to Copenhagen and Corfu from Liverpool for summer 2019.