The Oman Tourism Development Company (Omran) has extended the tender submission deadline for the contract to build the new Crowne Plaza Duqm Hotel resort to the 2 August.

This is the second time that the bid deadline has been extended. The previous deadline was 19 July, after the original submission date of 5 July was extended. By 19 July, 33 firms had collected tender documents for the project. The extension of the bid deadline is understood to be to give contractors more time to finalise their submissions.

The resort, which will be built on the coastline of the Arabian Sea in the sultanate, will have 228 rooms, including 11 executive suites and six smaller suites.

The Crowne Plaza’s parent company, Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), signed an agreement to manage the new hotel in December 2008. The resort will be the group’s sixth hotel project in Oman.

Omran recently awarded Denmark’s Cowi & Partners a OR742,000 ($1.9m) contract to supervise and manage the construction of the hotel project.

The government is developing a number of major projects in Duqm including an airport, a coal-fired power station and a ship repair and drydock complex.

Oman’s Transport & Communications Ministry recently received bids from five contractors for a $111m infrastructure package on its Duqm airport project.The ministry received bids for the infrastructure deal on 13 June. The successful contractor will build a runway and airfield infrastructure.

South Korea’s Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction Company submitted the lowest bid with a price of OR42.9m. This was 8 per cent lower than the OR46.6m submitted by the second lowest bidder, India’s firm Larsen & Toubro.

The local Galfar Engineering & Contracting submitted the third lowest bid with a price of OR50.4m. Athens-based Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) submitted a price of OR54.9m and the Turkish group Makyol put forward a bid of OR64.6m (MEED 24:6:10).