The value and rewards of hosting business events have been widely recognized by event organizers and other stakeholders. To be successful the organizers should be aware of the attitudes and perceptions of those who will be attending. At the present time there is limited research available in this area. In order to add to and explore the characteristics of a successful business event, this thesis will investigate the nature of business events using a sociological theory (Third Place) and apply it to a business event in order to gain a greater understanding of the symbiotic relationship between attendees and the event. The thesis will test a number of hypotheses relating to attitudes, motivations, perceived service quality and other factors. A theoretical framework is proposed for a case study model to understand the complex relationships, both direct and indirect. A unique business event hosted in Hangzhou China was selected because of its wide appeal to those attending, and because of its successful influence in the market. As part of this research an in-depth literature review was undertaken, which indicated that much of the literature was from a western perspective with less research relating to China, an important emerging market with unique cultural influences. Likewise, there was a lack of literature applying interdisciplinary theory to business events. To overcome the limitations of the existing literature which is mainly qualitative and descriptive, this thesis uses an empirical approach. Informed by the literature and direct observation of the event, a questionnaire was developed to survey attendees at the chosen conference that resulted in a total of 1122 self-reported questionnaires. Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) was conducted to identify the service gaps and suggest actions to take. From these findings exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was initially used to extract factors to subsequently inform an analysis of causal relationships. To test the impacts of continuous variables (e.g., rating of performance) and categorical variables (e.g., gender, education) on the dependent variables (different levels of satisfaction), a multinomial logistic regression (MLR) was performed. The five identified constructs were used to determine the power and influence of the predicting constructs on the attendees’ satisfaction and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed using WarpPLS. In addition to the quantitative data, qualitative data were also collected comprising 28 participants that identified important reasons to attend the conference and the perceptions of work-conference relationships by those interviewees. The findings from the research confirm that a business event can be considered as a Third Place. Research findings including PLS-SEM showed that most of the direct relational hypotheses and mediating hypotheses were supported by the empirical data, yet only one moderating effect was significant in moderating the relationship between service quality and attendees’ satisfaction by motivation. The rich findings of this research have epistemological, methodological, and practical implications in conducting event studies, which will facilitate future researchers to investigate business events from an alternative view and re-consider the nature and non-business functions, thus adding new knowledge to event studies and extending the application scope of the Third Place Theory. These findings will provide reliable information for different stakeholders to understand the Chinese event industry and business event attendees. Further, they enable the organizers to design and operate business events innovatively with the guidance of Third Place Theory to maximise the other functions and further develop the potential of business events to provide consumers with satisfactory services but also memorable and delight event experiences. In addition, future research directions and limitations are also reported, which will be useful for scholars to address these issues in a similar context.