Birtour as an Azerbaijan land operator for Japanese travel agencies

Birtour is a Baku-based destination management company. This page is for Japanese travel agencies and wholesalers buying Azerbaijan as land arrangements rather than as a finished package, and for the person inside that agency who would sign the contract. You sell in Japan, you own the client, and you set the retail price. We hold the hotel contracts, run the vehicles, supply the guides, file the permits, and put a named manager on the ground while your group is in the country.

The general version of that offer, written for operators in any market, is our ground operations guide for tour operators. This is the Japan-specific one, and it carries fewer figures than the general page on purpose. Several of the numbers a Japanese buyer would reasonably want from us are not settled, and where that is true this page names the gap and tells you what to ask for instead of printing an estimate.

Why a Japanese agency is asking about Azerbaijan this year

A Japanese agency wrote to us with two questions: whether we can arrange Japanese-speaking guides, and whether we can build itineraries around the Azerbaijan locations used in VIVANT. This page exists so that the answer does not have to be reassembled by email for the next agency that asks.

The background is short. TBS began the second season of VIVANT on 26 July 2026 in its Sunday drama slot, running in two parts, with a film to follow in December 2026. Filming took place at eight locations around the country from August 2025, Sasaki Masaaki, Yahoo News Japan expert commentary, 24 July 2026; that commentary names Sheki as one of the eight and Baku as a filming location in a photo caption, and identifies none of the rest. Hankyu Travel's itinerary labels six sites as filming locations, which is Hankyu's own designation rather than an announcement. Hankyu Travel has a six-day Azerbaijan package on sale, course ET391T, at ¥279,000 to ¥379,000 per person on a twin-share basis, with eleven fixed departures from 30 November 2026 out of Haneda via Istanbul.

Those are facts about a broadcaster and about another agency's product. None of them is a Birtour claim, and we hold no position in either. What they do tell you is that Japanese-language demand for Azerbaijan is about to arrive on a small number of dates, which is a scheduling problem before it is a pricing one.

What stays with you, and what sits with us

We run Baku and the Absheron peninsula with our own team, along with Gabala, Sheki, Quba, Ganja, Lahij, Shamakhi and the Caspian coast, rather than passing the file to a sub-contracted local. The reason that matters to a Japanese wholesaler is failure handling. When a vehicle fails on the Shamakhi road on a Sunday, the question is whether your partner fixes it directly or has to telephone someone who telephones someone else.

For a confirmed operator programme we hold room blocks for 30 days from quote across the cities in the routing, so a Baku and Sheki programme does not lose one end of itself while you are still selling the other.

Are rates quoted net, or on commission?

Birtour quotes net, per component: room nights at each property, transfers by vehicle class, guide days by language, entrance fees, and any permit costs, each as its own line. You add your margin where you want it. The mechanics, with the group rate break, are in our net rates and B2B pricing guide.

If your books run on commission rather than on net, we return the same programme written as a commissionable gross at the percentage you book at. We do not set that percentage, and there is no commission percentage published anywhere on this page. Ask for both formats in the first exchange if your internal system needs the gross; the money is identical and only the paperwork changes.

Which currency, and on what terms?

We quote net in USD or EUR. For agencies already contracting with us in one of those two currencies, we can hold the rate for a season by absorbing the conversion ourselves, which protects a retail price you are still selling against. Japanese yen is not part of that published arrangement today, and improvising one on a web page would be worth nothing to you in a contract negotiation.

So put it in the first email. Ask whether the quote can be issued in yen, whether the invoice can be issued in yen, which side carries the conversion, and which side carries the remittance charges. Get the answer in writing before you build a brochure price on top of it.

Our standard B2B terms, the same ones we publish for every operator market, are a 20 to 30 percent deposit on confirmation with the balance due 30 to 45 days before travel, and NET30 for an established partner. They are set out on the operator guide. There is no Japan-specific version of that schedule. If your settlement cycle needs a different one, treat it as something to negotiate rather than something we have already published, and expect us to answer it per contract.

Can you get a Japanese-speaking guide?

We work with Japanese-speaking guides in Azerbaijan today. That sentence is the whole of what we can state without qualification, which is why it has a page of its own.

We do not publish how many, whether they are salaried or contracted, how many Japanese-language groups we could cover at the same time, or a day rate. Availability is confirmed against your specific dates before you book, not held as a standing capacity, and if the answer for your dates is no you hear it before you book rather than after. The long version, including the three things worth discussing when nobody is free, is on our Japanese-speaking guides page.

How far ahead should you ask?

Ask before you fix the dates. No number of days appears on this page, because the binding constraint is a calendar rather than a notice period: a free week in October says nothing about the same week in May. Eleven fixed departures on someone else's product concentrate Japanese-language demand onto eleven windows, and anything you sell around them is competing for the same days.

Baku runs on GMT+4, five hours behind Tokyo, so an enquiry sent in the Tokyo morning is on our desk before our working day starts and gets answered inside it.

What does the Baku and Sheki ground plan actually involve?

Sheki is about 300 km north-west of Baku, four to four and a half hours by road via Shamakhi and Gabala. That one figure decides the shape of the programme. It is too far to run out and back inside a working day and still have the town, so a night in Sheki is a precondition rather than an upgrade, and the only real question is how many nights sit either side of it in Baku.

Two consequences for a Japanese group. The first is that the Sheki day is where a Japanese-speaking guide earns most and the airport transfer is where the language earns least, so if you are splitting a partial-availability programme, split it there. The second is that the return leg should land on a day with nothing time-critical waiting in Baku, because a four-and-a-half-hour drive has no useful slack in it.

The locations and the distances between them are on our VIVANT in Azerbaijan page, and the building at the end of the Sheki road is covered on the Sheki Caravanserai page.

What we are not publishing here

We do not publish a Japanese-language guide headcount, a staff-versus-contracted split, a maximum number of simultaneous Japanese-language groups, or a guide day rate. Each of those is a per-booking answer, and a figure we cannot hold to on your dates is worth less to you than an honest reply to the enquiry.

We do not publish our land-only rate for a six-day Baku and Sheki programme. The cost comparison we do publish, which sets out the one price that is public and the arithmetic we refuse to do, is our VIVANT tour cost page.

We do not publish a lead time in days, a commission percentage, or a yen payment term, for the reasons given above.

We do not publish entry requirements for Japanese passport holders on this page. Confirm those through the official Azerbaijani channel rather than from any DMC's marketing page, ours included, and confirm them again close to departure.

We do not speak for TBS, and we do not speak for the agencies selling packaged departures. We are also not waving a credential at you: Azerbaijan removed tourism services from its list of licensed activities, so a licence line proves less here than a Japanese trade buyer would reasonably expect, and our guide on how to choose an Azerbaijan DMC sets out what to check instead.

Disclosure

Birtour is not affiliated with TBS, with the VIVANT production committee, or with the travel companies selling packaged VIVANT departures. We are a destination management company based in Baku. This page describes how we contract with Japanese agencies as a land operator.

For a Japanese agency putting a first enquiry together, the brief that gets a fast and accurate answer is in our RFP guide, and the contracting side sits on our Azerbaijan DMC page.