Locksmith in the Cancun Hotel Zone

Arrival time: 20 to 40 minutes from downtown, depending on the kilometre marker.

The Hotel Zone is a twenty-five kilometre sandbar with a single road running down it, and that one fact governs everything about working here. There are no shortcuts and no parallel streets. If there is a stalled bus at kilometre 9, everybody behind it waits, including us. Which is why we quote arrival times by kilometre marker rather than as a single number: kilometre 4 is about twenty minutes from downtown, kilometre 20 is closer to forty, and at 6 p.m. on a Friday both are worse.

When you call, the kilometre marker is the most useful thing you can give us. Almost nobody staying here knows their street address, and it does not matter — every driver in the city navigates the boulevard by kilometre and by resort name. 'Kilometre 12, opposite the shopping centre' gets a technician to you faster than a full postal address does.

The building stock is different from the rest of Cancun too. This is condos and vacation rentals rather than houses, which means European-profile cylinders, electronic and code locks, and access controlled at a gate. That last part is where the time actually goes. Tell the gate a locksmith is coming the moment you hang up — otherwise the technician sits at the entrance being told he is not on a list, and your twenty-minute arrival becomes forty.

The most common call from this strip is the one everybody in Cancun has heard: a guest steps out to the pool or the beach, the door swings shut behind them, and the phone, the key and the shoes are all on the other side of it. It happens at every hour and disproportionately after midnight. Second most common is the rental car with the keys visible on the driver's seat, almost always in the beach club parking or at Playa Delfines.

Most of what we do here is in English, and it is the reason this service exists in the form it does. At two in the morning, standing in a corridor in a swimsuit, having to explain a broken lock through a translation app is its own small disaster. You will not have to.

One more thing specific to this strip: the locks take a beating. You are metres from the sea and the salt gets into the mechanism whether or not the door is under cover. An ordinary cylinder here starts sticking within about eighteen months, which is why when we replace one along the boulevard we fit treated brass or stainless steel. It costs a few hundred pesos more and outlives three of the cheap ones.