For passengers, a flight delay often looks simple: the departure time changes, the gate gets more crowded, and a connection more uncertain. But the cause is ordinary and much harder to fix. A cabin-cleaning team may be short-staffed. A wheelchair attendant may be unavailable. A late-arriving aircraft may need more people on the ground than the original shift plan anticipated.
I met BestTurn‘s founder and CEO Wonjin Choi in person at the Incheon Startup Park (S. Korea) to discuss how his startup approaches that problem. Today, his company operates at Incheon International Airport and says its SpotWork platform can identify and match qualified workers to an urgent airport task within three minutes.
BestTurn is not creating a qualified airport worker in three minutes. It is trying to match from a pool of people who have already been trained, credentialed, and prepared to work in the airport environment.
When I asked whether the company was essentially “Uber for airport staff,” Choi agreed with the broad analogy, then immediately explained its limits. BestTurn does not cover flight attendants, for example. It focuses on the ground-side jobs needed to prepare an aircraft for its next departure: cabin cleaning, loading and unloading, catering, passenger assistance, and other services around the aircraft turnaround.
Choi said there can be roughly 30 job functions associated with a single flight operation. Passengers may notice a cleaning team entering the plane or someone assisting a traveler with a wheelchair, but most of the work remains invisible. It happens between the moment one group of passengers leaves the aircraft and the moment another group boards. If any part of that chain is delayed, the effects can reach the next departure.
The company says its platform digitizes workers’ security passes, training records, and job qualifications, then uses factors such as certification, skill, location, preference, and fatigue to recommend assignments. Its investor deck says the system is intended to respond to disruptions—such as delays, no-shows, or sudden demand for another cleaning team.
The key detail from our conversation is where those workers come from. The goal is to recruit local people who live near the airport, then prepare them for eligible work. He said that process can take more than a month because workers need training, licenses where applicable, and airport-security access before they can be dispatched.
Only after that preparation can the work become flexible. Choi described workers receiving an alert on their phones and accepting an assignment when they are available. Some may spend time at the airport before a shift, taking advantage of its facilities, while others may come from nearby. The important point is that they are not anonymous gig workers entering a secure environment without preparation.
That is what makes BestTurn more interesting than a conventional staffing app. The matching software is key, but the more difficult work is building a trusted pool of workers that airlines, ground handlers, and airport operators will accept. Airport ground operations are safety-sensitive, regulated, and labor-intensive.
That is BestTurn’s potential moat. Matching software can be copied, but building a trusted, credentialed worker pool and earning acceptance from airlines and airport operators requires experience, compliance systems, and… time.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) says the sector continues to face skilled-worker shortages, recruitment challenges, and the need for standardized training and attention to fatigue and other human factors. IATA’s ground-operations guidance shows why an airport cannot treat this like ordinary on-demand work.
The startup’s business argument is equally straightforward. Airlines and handlers need enough people to manage peak periods, but keeping a large reserve workforce can be costly when activity falls. BestTurn argues that a more flexible pool lets customers pay for work performed rather than maintaining as much idle capacity.
Its investor deck uses a wheelchair-service example in which the airline pays about $30 per service hour, the worker receives about $21, and BestTurn keeps about $9. This seems comparable to rates I’ve seen or heard about in the temporary staffing industry.
The U.S. market is attractive because the scale is enormous. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said its commercial airports handled nearly 146 million passengers in 2024, their second consecutive record year. The Port Authority’s announcement illustrates the number of aircraft turnarounds and service handoffs that take place every day across the region.
BestTurn says it hopes to enter the U.S. through relationships developed with airlines at Incheon, including American Airlines and Alaska Airlines. The company’s investor deck says it is seeking $1.5 million to support a planned first U.S. airport operation by the first half of 2027.
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