Two numbers matter when you are standing outside a door: how long until someone arrives, and how long until the door opens. They have almost nothing to do with each other.
Getting to you
Between the seafront and the top of Sierra de Altea there is a fifteen-minute drive in good conditions, and considerably more in August. Add the old town, where the last part of the journey is on foot up steps, and the hillside urbanisations, where finding the plot can take longer than the drive.
The honest variables are:
- Where the technician is when you call, which nobody can know in advance.
- Where you are, and whether a vehicle reaches the door.
- The time of day. The N-332 through town in July is not the N-332 in February.
- What is already in progress. A job halfway through a mechanism repair does not stop.
This is why a firm promise of “fifteen minutes” should make you suspicious rather than relieved. It is a number chosen to stop you calling anyone else.
Opening the door
Once someone is at your door, the work itself is usually shorter than the wait.
- A door on the latch: often minutes.
- A deadlocked door with a standard cylinder: longer, and it varies with the lock.
- A multipoint door that has jammed: longer again, because the mechanism has to be dealt with as well as the lock.
- A high-security cylinder: longest, because it was built to be difficult.
A locksmith working carefully on a lock they intend to save will take longer than one reaching for a drill in the first minute. That patience is what keeps you from paying for a new cylinder.
What makes your call faster
Describe the door accurately. Material, lock type, and whether it was locked with the key or pulled shut. The wrong description means the wrong tools.
Send a photograph. The door edge, the handle, the keyhole. It removes all the guesswork in one message.
Give a findable location. A pin on a map beats an address on the hillside, where urbanisation names repeat and house numbers do not run in order.
Say if it is genuinely urgent. Someone shut inside, a pet in the heat, a hob left on. That moves you up the list, and it should.
What a good locksmith tells you
A window rather than a single number. A message if that window slips. A price before setting off, and a warning if what they find is different from what you described.
You are entitled to all four. If you are given none of them, you are entitled to call somebody else while you wait.
The part nobody likes
Sometimes the answer is an hour. On a Sunday in August, with the town full and three jobs ahead of yours, that is simply the truth. Hearing it accurately is more useful than hearing a comfortable number that turns into two hours of standing on a landing.
If you want to know what happens once someone does arrive, the opening itself is described here, and the coverage map explains why some parts of Altea take longer to reach than others.