Kuala Lumpur is a busy city with ordered skyscrapers, six-lane highways, colonial architecture and lots of greenery. Home to the Petronas Twin Towers, it is a shopping paradise with some of Southeast Asia’s largest shopping malls, housing the world’s top brands, and street markets where you can get one-of-a-kind items.

Sure, there is a lot of traffic, but turn a corner and the city bursts to exotic life with mosques and temples side-by-side with street markets and towering high-rises. Plus, if you need more reason to love KL there is the food – with thousands of restaurants serving every imaginable type of food to suit every budget.

Tourism plays an important role in the city’s service-driven economy. Many large worldwide hotel chains have a presence in the Kuala Lumpur. KL is the sixth most visited city in the world, with 8.9 million tourists per year. Tourism in Kuala Lumpur driven by the city’s cultural diversity, relatively low costs, and wide gastronomic and shopping variety. MICE tourism, which mainly encompasses conventions has expanded in recent years to become a vital component of the industry and is expected to grow further once the Malaysian government’s Economic Transformation Programme kicks in, and with the completion of a new 93,000m2-size MATRADE Centre in 2014. Another notable trend is the increased presence of budget hotels in the city.