Locksmith in Puerto Cancún, the Marina District

Arrival time: 15 to 25 minutes from downtown.

Puerto Cancún is the marina development between downtown and the start of the Hotel Zone: condo towers, a golf course, a marina and a shopping centre, all inside a controlled perimeter. It is where a lot of long-stay visitors and foreign residents end up, because it is close to everything without being on the boulevard.

It is also, from our side of the job, the most procedural part of the city. Almost every building here has a gate, a concierge and a list, and none of them will let a technician through on his own say-so. The single most useful thing you can do when you call is ring the front desk immediately afterwards and tell them a locksmith is coming for your unit. Do that and we arrive in twenty minutes. Skip it and the technician spends longer at the barrier than he does at your door.

The hardware here is a step up from the rest of Cancun. European-profile cylinders, multi-point doors that lock at three places along the frame, and a growing number of electronic and code locks in units that are rented out. That changes the work: a multi-point door takes longer to open than a standard one and is priced accordingly, and it is worth saying on the phone whether your door catches in more than one place when it closes.

Because so many units here are rented short-term, a large share of the calls are host-and-guest situations. A guest arrives at eleven at night, the code they were sent does not work, and the host is asleep in another country. If you are the guest, a booking confirmation with the address plus your passport is normally enough for us to proceed; a message from the host confirming it settles it entirely.

The other regular call is the boat. Marina berths bring their own locks — cabin doors, hatches, lockers and the padlocks that live in salt spray year-round and seize solid. Those are a different job from a front door and we would rather know it is a boat before we arrive with the wrong bag.

Salt exposure is severe here, more than downtown and comparable to the boulevard. Anything we replace in Puerto Cancún gets treated hardware by default, because an untreated cylinder within sight of the marina does not last two years.