Chile's Ministry of Public Works (MOP) has extended the deadline of the tender process for the concession contract to expand and operate Santiago's international airport.

Technical and economic bids were initially due on September 30. MOP has extended this deadline to 18 November 2014. MOP had started the pre-qualification process in February 2013.

MOP reported:

It assure greater participation and more competition among consortia bidding for this tender, and will moreover favour the users of the main air terminal in Chile. The opening of financial bids remains scheduled for 18 December 2014, and the decision is provisionally estimated to be made in the first quarter of 2015. These changes do not alter the overall time line for this process, which will allow the licensee to operate the new contract once the current consortium concludes its concession on 30 September 2015.

The concession will require investment of US$655 million.

The concession includes the development of a 200,00 m2 new international passenger terminal, the remodelling and expansion of the existing domestic passenger terminal, the construction of more than 4,000 new parking spaces in a multi-storey car park, and a number of landscaping projects.

Interested companies are, among others, Aéroports de Paris, Flughafen München, Fraport, Mexican airport operator GAP, Argentina's Corporación América and Opain, concessionaire of Bogotá's El Dorado international airport.

Once the concession has been awarded, there will be a one-year period for engineering development, followed by four years of construction works.

The project aims to triple Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport's capacity to 29 million per year by 2030 and 50 million por year by 2045. The current airport infrastructure has a capacity of just 9 million passengers.

According to the MOP, the airport handled most that 15 million passengers in 2013, despite only having capacity for 9 million. Santiago accounts for nearly 70% of Chile's airport passenger traffic.