Are hotel projects continuing to move forward in Dubai?
Work on projects in Dubai has slowed down immensely. It’s difficult to say which projects have been cancelled and which are being delayed. Clearly the financial crisis means that everyone has to take a step back and rethink their finances, and a lot of companies are taking this opportunity to re-tender their contracts. One client in Abu Dhabi told me that he was able to negotiate as much as a 40% reduction on his overall project costs. We can speculate that some of the more expensive and imaginative projects are not going to move forward, and that is probably a good thing. But there has been encouraging news on the horizon which indicates that projects which came to a stop – but which already had infrastructure work done on them – will probably restart toward the end of the year. Overall it is clear that the recovery is not going to happen at the end of the first quarter, as we had hoped back in January. It is also not likely to happen at the half year mark, as you have the summer mont
