Is this the cheapest hotel on the planet?

One hotel in Bangladesh is stretching the concept of budget accommodation to a new extreme.

Faridpur Hotel is made up of five boats on the banks of the Buriganga in the country’s capital, Dhaka, and a night’s stay starts at just 31p.

As expected for such a price, facilities are beyond basic: there is access to water and toilets, but the rooms amount to little more than communal bunks, shared by dozens of guests.

The boat hotels, despite their shortcomings, are increasingly popular with tourists, who mix with locals and workers, some who stay for months. Each guest is afforded a small locker to keep their belongings safe.

“We have anywhere around 40 guests at a time in our hotel and they stay for as long as three months,” owner Muhammad Mustafa Miyan told the Mail.

Beyond the communal bunks that command the lowest price, there are 48 rooms with a little more privacy.

Guests after a private cabin must pay for the most expensive rooms, at a cost of £1.25 a night.

Miyan, who has run the hotel for 26 years, said: “It is cheap so people who come from small towns and villages for their work and business stay here.

“For a nominal price, they get purified water, clean toilets [and] separate beds. And we also provide our customers with small lockers to keep their valuable things. But food is not provided.”

The hotel is just one of a number of similar floating hotels that offer cheap accommodation to traders in the region.

The Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka is particularly short of space. With 114,300 people for each square mile, it has been called the world’s most crowded city. It is also among the world’s fastest growing, and regularly appears near the top of studies analysing the planet’s least liveable cities.