Every maintenance tender in Dubai asks for both prices: comprehensive and non-comprehensive. The comparison is usually presented as spare parts in or out. That framing is why so many of these contracts end badly for one side or the other.
The real question is who carries the consequence of plant failing — and on a handed-over building, that plant was selected, installed and commissioned by someone else, operated by someone else again, and documented incompletely.
What each model actually means
| Non-comprehensive | Comprehensive | |
|---|---|---|
| What is priced | Labour, planned visits, minor consumables | The same, plus parts and the risk of failure |
| Who carries a chiller compressor failure | Owner, on approval of a quotation | Contractor, within the contract value |
| Cost profile for the owner | Lower fixed fee, variable and unpredictable spend | Higher fixed fee, predictable |
| What the contractor needs to price it | Scope, asset list, visit frequency | Asset condition, age, history, spares availability |
| Failure mode of the contract | Deferred repairs; asset decline | Disputes about what counts as covered |
| Best suited to | Newer plant, or an owner with technical capability | Ageing plant, or an owner who needs budget certainty |
Neither is inherently better. A comprehensive contract on well-documented plant still under warranty is the owner buying insurance they may not need. A non-comprehensive contract on twenty-year-old chillers, held by an owner who defers every quotation, is a slow write-off of the asset.
Why the condition survey decides everything
A contractor asked to price comprehensive cover without seeing the plant will do one of two things: load the price heavily, or price it optimistically and manage the shortfall later through exclusions. Both are bad outcomes for the owner.
A funded pre-contract survey changes the conversation. What it should establish:
- A verified asset register — actual make, model, serial, capacity and installation date, not the O&M manual's version.
- Condition and remaining life for major plant: chillers, pumps, generators, switchgear, fire pumps, lifts interface, BMS.
- Maintenance history, or an honest statement that there is none.
- Refrigerant type and availability — obsolete refrigerant changes the economics of every repair.
- Spare parts availability and lead time, especially for discontinued equipment and legacy controls.
- Known defects, deferred repairs and any plant already running outside its design envelope.
- The state of the BMS: how much of it works, how much is mapped, how much is being read.
The clauses that decide whether it works
Statutory and third-party items
Annual fire system inspection and certification, water tank cleaning and analysis, pressure vessel inspection, lifting equipment, thermographic surveys, generator load testing, pump flow testing. These are dated obligations, not maintenance tasks. Name each one with its interval, its responsible party and its evidence requirement.
Response times that mean something
A single response time across all faults is meaningless. Define categories — life safety, loss of cooling to a critical area, guest or resident affecting, non-urgent — with an attendance time and a rectification target for each, and define how the clock starts and stops. A response target with no defined start time cannot be measured.
Exclusions, written plainly
- Whole-plant replacement above a stated value or age threshold.
- Damage from misuse, third-party work, or the owner's own contractors.
- Consequential loss.
- Improvements and capacity upgrades, as distinct from repairs.
- Work arising from a design inadequacy in the original installation.
- Vandalism, force majeure, and water ingress from the building fabric.
The design-inadequacy exclusion deserves attention. Plant that fails repeatedly because it was undersized or badly controlled is not a maintenance problem, and no AMC price can absorb it indefinitely. Say so before signing, with the evidence.
What the owner should require in return
- A planned maintenance schedule mapped to a recognised standard, with task lists per asset type and per frequency.
- Logged work with dated evidence — a system record, not a paper sheet in a cupboard.
- Asset register maintained as a living document, with every replacement recorded.
- Monthly reporting on completion rate, reactive call volume by asset, energy consumption trend and open defects.
- An annual condition report with a capital plan — what needs replacing in the next one, three and five years.
- A defined exit: asset register, history and outstanding defects handed over cleanly to a successor.
That last item is worth insisting on. Buildings that change maintenance contractors every few years without a proper handover accumulate an unknown asset base, and the first thing every new contractor does is price the unknown.
The cheapest AMC in year one is frequently the most expensive in year five — not because of the rate, but because of what it stopped anyone from knowing about the building.
A last thought for anyone tendering this. Ask each bidder how many technicians they will assign, whether those technicians are direct employees, and what the escalation path is at 2am on a Friday. The answers tell you more about how the contract will feel than the price does.
