When a two-person team flies out of Türkiye to meet an importer in Japan face to face, the airfare and the Tokyo hotel bill already add up to a serious number before the first meeting even starts. Türkiye's overseas market research support, run by the Ministry of Trade, targets exactly those two line items: for companies that meet the conditions, the state covers half of the travel and accommodation cost, within defined caps.
The rules changed considerably in 2026. A form prepared through the Easy Export Platform now sits at the centre of the process, and support can be claimed only once per country. Because a lot of what is still online describes the old rules, this guide is written against the current circular dated 2 March 2026 and the 2026 caps. As a team that works on meetings and trade fairs on the Japanese side, we have also added where those rules land in practice.
What is covered and what is not
The scheme covers two items. First, transport: economy class air, rail, sea and bus tickets used for international and intercity travel. Second, accommodation: room and breakfast up to a daily per-person cap. At most two people per trip are counted, and they must be partners or employees of the company.
Knowing what falls outside matters just as much. Urban transport, taxis, car rental and fuel are not covered. Meals, interpreting, consultancy and sample shipments are not the subject of this scheme either. Apartment-type rentals are not accepted, so do not expect support for nights spent in an Airbnb-style flat.
There is also clarity on who qualifies. As İMMİB's 2026 application guide states, the scheme is aimed at industrial and trading companies dealing in goods. Service-sector companies cannot use it.
The 2026 caps
Caps are revised at the start of each year by the average of the CPI and the domestic PPI. You may still see 2,500 TL written for accommodation in the circular; that is the 2022 starting value. The cap of the year in which the activity took place is what applies. For 2026 the table looks like this:
| Item | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Reimbursement rate | 50 percent |
| Cap per activity (transport and accommodation) | 490,559 TL |
| Accommodation (room + breakfast) | Up to 12,264 TL per person per day |
| People covered | Maximum 2 (partner or employee) |
| Research days covered | Minimum 2, maximum 10 days (travel days excluded) |
| Number of activities | Maximum 5 per year, 20 in total |
| Activities per country | Maximum 1 |
| Countries per trip | Maximum 3 |
| Claim deadline | 3 months from return to Türkiye |
Companies holding the TSE K 645 Women Entrepreneur certificate get an extra edge: 20 percentage points are added to the rate for trips to a country on the Ministry's target country list. Japan is one of the 60 target countries designated for 2026, so for a certificate holder the Japan rate rises to 70 percent. Which year's list applies is determined by the date on the payment document.
Three things that changed in 2026
A short step back first. The April 2024 amendment tied the scheme to an export plan approved under the Market Entry Project Preparation Support. To claim support for a market research trip, you first had to go through a separate process and get that plan approved.
The first change is that this precondition is gone. The amendment made on 26 November 2025, in force from 1 January 2026, replaced the export plan requirement with a Market Research Form (EK-A3) prepared by the company on the Easy Export Platform (KİP). For companies with an approved export plan the requirement counts as met for the period the plan covers, and trips to countries in that plan continue to be supported.
The second change is the country rule. Two activities per country within a calendar year used to be supported. Now only one market research activity per country is supported for a company. The new text does not say "calendar year", so this entitlement does not reset annually. Countries visited before 1 January 2026 do not count against it. In practice you have exactly one Japan claim, and the trip has to be planned accordingly.
The third change is dated 2 March 2026. Authority to approve the form was taken from the Ministry and given to the exporters' associations that review the applications. Guides written in late 2025 and early 2026 will tell you the Ministry approves the form; since March 2026 the associations do.
The EK-A3 form: no Japan on the list, no support
The heart of the form is the target market table, and it must be filled in using the Smart Export Robot on KİP. You log in to KİP with your e-Devlet credentials. When you open a new search in the robot and select your product group by HS code, it returns a list of suggested markets. Each row of the table holds one HS code and one country that the robot suggested for it. There is no limit on the number of countries, and the same HS code can appear in several rows with different countries. A screenshot of the robot showing the HS code and all suggested countries goes into the form as well.
Here is the rule that is easy to miss: the target countries in the form are limited to what the robot suggests. If the robot does not suggest Japan for your product, you cannot write Japan into the form, and your Japan trip will not be supported through this route. For a company set on Japan, the first thing to do before looking at flights is to log in to KİP and check whether Japan comes up for its products.
A few notes that help while preparing the form:
- Try the different HS codes in your field of activity one by one. A country not suggested for one product group may appear for another. The HS code does of course have to genuinely fall within your company's activity.
- The form can be revised only once. Adding every country you might plausibly travel to in the coming period on the first submission beats burning the revision right early.
- Alongside incorporation date, capital, shareholding structure, headcount and the four-digit NACE code, the form also asks for the last three years of export value, volume and unit price by country. Getting that data from your accounting team in advance speeds things up.
- For each target country you also declare whether you have a unit there. A shop, warehouse, office or shared office, showroom, or a rented shelf or corner inside a store all count. If you have such a unit in Japan, expenses relating to that country are not supported.
The approval application is opened as a new application under the Export Supports menu in DYS. You select your NACE code, enter every country listed in the form, upload the form and the signature circular, and submit. Companies with an approved export plan upload the plan instead of the form and enter the countries it covers.
The circular states clearly that expenses of a trip made before the form is approved can be supported once it is approved. Some guides claim the opposite. Reversing the order still carries a risk, though: if you travel first and prepare the form afterwards, and the robot does not suggest Japan, the whole cost stays with the company.
Building the schedule: one meeting for every research day
The core of the rule is simple. For every day you carry out research, you are expected to have met at least one company or institution resident in that country, each one different from the others. Nights on days without a meeting are not supported. The first and last days of the trip and weekends are exempt from this condition. The trip must also start in Türkiye and end in Türkiye.
There are a few important details. Meetings with different departments of the same company count as one company. The application must show meetings with at least two different resident companies or institutions across at least two days. All meetings have to be entered at the time of application, because changes cannot be requested afterwards. If a company you met has no website, you are expected to say so in the notes field and to write the meeting assessment in more detail.
The clock starts the day after you arrive in the country. The supported portion is at most 10 days excluding travel. If the trip runs longer, up to 20 days, the transport and accommodation of the first 10 days plus the outbound and return tickets are supported; a trip exceeding 20 days is not assessed at all. At most three countries can fit into one trip. A ticket to a country where you hold no meeting and the accommodation there are not supported, and neither is travelling to such a country directly from Türkiye or returning to Türkiye from it.
Meeting this condition in Japan can be harder than it looks on paper. Japanese companies generally expect meeting requests weeks in advance, with a clear agenda and, where possible, correspondence in Japanese. An English introduction email sent from Türkiye can easily go unanswered. Reaching decision-makers is harder still during Golden Week in late April and early May, the Obon period in mid-August, and the New Year holidays. The circular exempts weekends from the meeting condition; for a public holiday that falls on a weekday and passes without a meeting, we would ask your association in advance how it will be treated. The safest approach is to schedule outside those periods and to keep a backup meeting ready for each day. A single cancellation can push that day's accommodation out of scope.
A sample week in Tokyo and Osaka
Picture a two-person team. They arrive in Tokyo on Sunday. On Monday and Tuesday they meet one importer each in Tokyo. On Wednesday morning they take the Shinkansen to Osaka and visit a distributor's office in the afternoon. On Thursday they meet the buying team of a retail chain in Osaka, and on Friday they fly back to Türkiye.
Sunday night falls on the weekend and the nights from Monday to Thursday fall on days with meetings, so all five nights are within scope. The Shinkansen leg between Tokyo and Osaka counts as intercity rail under transport, and no separate payment document is required for train tickets.
The figures below are rounded assumptions, included only to show how the calculation works:
| Item | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Flights (Istanbul-Tokyo, Osaka-Istanbul, economy) | 2 people × 65,000 TL | 130,000 TL |
| Shinkansen (Tokyo-Osaka) | 2 people × 4,500 TL | 9,000 TL |
| Hotel (room + breakfast) | 2 people × 5 nights × 8,000 TL | 80,000 TL |
| Total eligible expenses | 219,000 TL | |
| Support (50 percent) | 109,500 TL |
If the Wednesday meeting is cancelled at the last minute and no replacement company can be found, that day's accommodation for two people (16,000 TL) drops out and the support falls to 101,500 TL. Had the same trip been made by a company holding TSE K 645, the 70 percent rate would give 153,300 TL. The choice of hotel matters too: in a hotel above 12,264 TL per person per night, the excess is out of scope. Payments made in yen are converted to Turkish lira at the central bank rate on the date of the payment document.
Collecting the paperwork as you go
What costs the most time after the trip is chasing a document that was not kept while travelling. On a Japan trip, watch these points in particular:
- Flights: Keep the e-ticket and the boarding passes. With boarding passes in hand you will not need alternatives such as a passport page or an airline letter. If the ticket was bought through an agency, a detailed invoice containing the e-ticket information is required. If any leg on the ticket is business, first or comfort class, the entire ticket falls out of scope; buying an economy ticket and upgrading later, however, does not prevent the economy fare from being supported.
- Hotel: Get a detailed invoice showing the room and breakfast amount, the guest, the hotel and the dates. Hotel receipts in Japan are frequently issued in Japanese, and sworn translation can be requested for documents in languages other than English. Asking for an English invoice at check-out beats dealing with a translation afterwards. If the booking was made through a platform, the platform's expense document showing the guest, the property and the dates is also accepted. If the issuer of the invoice differs from the company that received the payment, a document showing the link between them is also required.
- Shinkansen: Paper tickets are collected by the automatic gate at the arrival station. To keep yours, use the staffed gate instead and ask for the ticket to be stamped and handed back. A receipt from the ticket machine or the online booking system is a good backup.
- Payments: All payments must go through banking channels and be documented with a bank-approved receipt or statement. Company cards, cards of people authorised to spend on the company's behalf, and an employee's own card are all accepted. If an employee paid with their own card, a receipt showing the company reimbursed them via a bank transfer is also required. Cash deposited over the counter and payments by customer cheque or endorsed cheque are not accepted.
- Personal documents: If an employee travelled, the SGK declaration for that month; if a partner travelled, a trade registry gazette or share ledger showing the current capital structure. For Turkish citizens, a family registry record obtained from e-Devlet is also required.
- Declaration (EK A-2): The form, signed by a person authorised to represent the company, declaring that you are not claiming support for trips accompanied by a spouse or a blood relative up to the second degree.
During the review the association may, if it sees fit, submit invoices and payment documents issued in Japan for approval by the Commercial Counsellor's Office in Tokyo. That is another reason for documents to be legible and complete. Originals of documents uploaded to DYS must be kept for at least 10 years. Some associations also charge a file processing fee; at EİB and İMMİB, for example, it is 323 TL and the receipt has to be added to the application documents.
The application and what follows
If your company is not registered with the Support Management System (DYS), that is where to start. Getting the EK-A3 approved before the trip is the most comfortable route, because another clock starts on your return: the claim must be filed within three months of the entry date into Türkiye of the employee who travelled. The date the application was submitted from DYS is what counts.
Before applying, you upload the invoices and payment documents one by one into the Beneficiary Documents section of DYS. Then, on the application screen, you select the EK-A3 you had approved and enter the departure and entry dates for Türkiye, the HS codes, the travellers, the countries and the meetings.
The assessment form inside the application is not a section to rush. You are expected to have researched which countries the target market imports from before the trip, to state the share of the targeted sales in both your total sales and your total exports separately, and to give an export projection for the country. If you visited more than one country, you answer the questions separately for each.
A small but irritating detail: the submit button in DYS is visible only to fully authorised users. Even if the accounting team prepares the application, the final step has to be taken by an authorised user.
If the association finds something missing, the application comes back to you. You must complete the missing items within three months of the notification; if the deadline passes, payment is made only for the items whose documents are complete. If a deficiency not listed in the first letter is identified later, the association can grant a one-off extension of up to three months. One note from the İMMİB guide saves time: if you open a returned application from the My Applications screen, the Submit button does not appear; you have to open it from the Pending Update/Transfer section under My Workflows. Checking DYS every couple of weeks is the easiest way not to miss a deadline.
Before payment, the company is checked for overdue tax and social security debt. If there is debt, the support amount is first set off against it and the remainder is paid to the company.
Mistakes that void the whole claim
Some mistakes take not one line item but the entire trip out of scope.
If your spouse or a blood relative up to the second degree accompanies the trip, it is not supported even if those people are partners or employees of the company. Not claiming for them separately does not change the outcome.
If you exhibited at a trade fair with a stand in the same country on the same dates, the application is not supported. Meetings held in Japan during the week you had a stand at FOODEX Japan, for instance, cannot be claimed under this scheme. İMMİB lists such applications among its examples of misleading declarations. If misleading information or documents are identified, the application is not assessed and the company cannot apply for support for expenses made during the six months following notification of the sanction. Claiming support for the same expense from another programme is also treated as submitting misleading information.
Group trips, visits made jointly by five or more companies, and events such as meetings, exhibitions and conferences organised abroad by institutions are also outside this scheme. Walking a fair as a visitor without a stand is not separately prohibited in the text; even so, it is safer to weight the schedule towards one-to-one meetings at company offices and to consult your association in advance when plans overlap with a fair.
There is a sensible way to use the trade fair and market research schemes without them clashing: visit the Japanese buyers you met at your stand a few months later, at their own offices, on a separate trip. It is worth choosing the dates knowing that this trip will use your single Japan entitlement. You can follow the dates of the year's major fairs in our Japan trade fair calendar.
Are consultancy and interpreting costs covered?
No. This scheme covers transport and accommodation only; payments for arranging meetings, interpreting or consultancy fall outside it. Consultancy and reporting services taken while preparing a market entry strategy and an export plan are the subject of a separate scheme, the Market Entry Project Preparation Support, which covers 50 percent of those costs. If you have an export plan approved that way, you can make the EK-A3 approval application with the plan instead of the form.
What makes the Japan side easier?
The conditions bite hardest at the point of building a meeting calendar in Japan with a different company every day. That is why the rules of the scheme have to be part of the planning from the start: a separate meeting for each research day, an orderly document file, and one entitlement per country.
At Gordion Global, our team in Osaka supports identifying potential buyers and partners, coordinating appointments, interpreting in Turkish, English and Japanese during meetings, and local coordination. For details, see our Interpretation and Meetings and Market Entry pages.
Frequently asked questions
Can companies exporting services use this scheme?
According to İMMİB's 2026 application guide, no. The scheme is aimed at industrial and trading companies dealing in goods, which is consistent with the form being built around HS codes.
Can we claim support if we travel to Japan before the form is approved?
Yes. Expenses of a trip made before approval can be supported once the form is approved. The condition is that Japan appears in the approved form.
We have already made a supported trip to Japan. Can we claim again?
Countries visited before 1 January 2026 are not counted under the one-activity-per-country rule. For 2026 and onwards, a single activity for Japan is supported. The limits of 5 activities per year and 20 in total also apply.
Can the costs be paid with an employee's own credit card?
Yes. You then need to add a bank-approved receipt showing that the company reimbursed the employee through a bank.
What is the deadline for applying?
Within three months of the entry date into Türkiye of the employee who travelled, through DYS. The date the application was submitted from the system is what counts.
Is the rate different for companies with the women entrepreneur certificate?
For companies holding the TSE K 645 standard, the rate rises by 20 percentage points for trips to target countries. Japan is on the 2026 target country list, so the rate becomes 70 percent.
Official sources
- Ministry of Trade: Overseas Market Research Support, circular and annexes
- Easy Export Platform (KİP)
- Support Management System (DYS) login
This article is based on Decree No. 5973 on Export Supports as in force in September 2026, the Circular on Overseas Market Research Support dated 2 March 2026, and the 2026 support caps. Caps are updated at the start of each year; we recommend confirming with your exporters' association before applying. The content does not constitute legal or financial advice.
