Çelebi Brand Guidelines: A 1958 Ankara Ground Handler in Five Countries

One ladder and five workers in Ankara.

Çelebi traces its start to 1958, when Ali Cavit Çelebioğlu set up Çelebi Hava Servisi at Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport. The company says the business began “with one ladder and five workers,” and it describes the firm as Türkiye’s first private ground handling company. Today the group trades internationally as Çelebi Aviation, with its head office in Istanbul’s Ümraniye district, and the Çelebi name heads each of its national companies.

The Turkish company, Çelebi Hava Servisi A.Ş., was listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange in 1996, according to the company’s own timeline, which presents the listing as the step that strengthened its finances and widened its reach. In 2013 it formed what it calls a strategic partnership with the investment firm Actera, which the company says gave it stronger financial backing and room to expand. Its group chief executive since the start of 2017, the company says, is also an operating partner of Actera Group.

At home, Çelebi Aviation Türkiye says it works at 32 stations. The company also points to investments beyond the ramp: a warehouse in Istanbul, and premium Platinum lounges at Diyarbakır Airport, opened in 2022, and at Çukurova International Airport, opened in 2024. It describes its overall offer as ramp and cargo handling, passenger services, general aviation operations, warehouse management and Platinum services, all, it says, run to international aviation safety and quality standards.

Budapest, Frankfurt, Medan and Nairobi.

Expansion abroad began in 2006, when the company set up Çelebi Ground Handling Hungary in Budapest, which it calls its first international venture. The Budapest business went on to open the group’s first Platinum lounges at Liszt Ferenc International Airport in 2015, and the company says it now covers ground handling, cargo, passenger and lounge services and general aviation there, with more than 1,000 employees at Budapest Airport. In 2011 came Çelebi Cargo GmbH at Frankfurt Airport, which the company says runs a cargo facility of about 23,000 square metres with some 250 staff.

Not every venture lasted. The company’s timeline records a ground handling business at Vienna International Airport from 2011 until 2019, and a Tanzanian unit in Dar es Salaam, set up in 2021, whose operations ended in 2026.

Southeast Asia followed in 2024, with the acquisition of PT Prathita Titiannusantara and the creation of PT Celebi Aviation Indonesia. The trade magazine Cargo Airports & Airline Services reported on 14 May 2025 that Çelebi was starting operations at a new cargo terminal at Kualanamu International Airport, near Medan in North Sumatra, a site of 8,000 square metres equipped for cold-chain and dangerous-goods cargo, handling international, domestic and transit freight including perishables, pharmaceuticals and live animals; at that point the magazine described the group as working across three continents, six countries and 70 stations. In January 2026 the Indonesian news site JPNN reported that Çelebi had begun ground handling at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta and Bali’s I Gusti Ngurah Rai airports from early that month, starting with domestic flights and more than 350 staff across the two sites. The report gave first-year targets of 4,500 flights and 1.6 million passengers in Jakarta and 1,800 flights and 650,000 passengers in Bali.

East Africa came in 2025, when the company acquired Transglobal Cargo Centre at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, a business it says was first set up in 2005. From 1 August 2026, the company announced, Çelebi Aviation Kenya began handling Turkish Airlines’ Istanbul–Nairobi flights, with passenger, ramp, turnaround and baggage services, adding to a customer list that it says already included British Airways and Emirates SkyCargo. The company put the new contract at seven weekly flights, or about 365 a year, and said it aimed to serve 75,000 to 80,000 passengers a year on the route.

How ground handlers present themselves.

Ground handling and airport-service firms work out of sight of most travellers, on aprons, in cargo sheds and behind check-in desks, so their public identity is built mostly from their own websites, press releases and careers pages. The companies in this guide load and unload aircraft, check in passengers, move baggage, build and break down cargo pallets and, in some cases, fuel aircraft, usually under contract to airlines rather than in their own name.

Photography does much of the work. Handlers publish pictures of ramp and terminal staff in branded uniforms and high-visibility vests, of tugs, belt loaders and pushback tractors in company colours, and of warehouses lined with pallets. Where a handler runs lounges or premium passenger services, those pages show the brand in front of travellers rather than airlines.

The second staple is the network. Station maps, airport counts, staff numbers and annual figures for flights, passengers or tonnes appear on almost every corporate site, and they change often as contracts are won, lost or bought. Service lists follow a common pattern, split into ramp, passenger, cargo, mail and fuelling work, though each company names and groups them in its own way, and the counts in this guide are given as each company or a dated source states them.

Recruitment is the third. Ground handling depends on large shift-based workforces, and careers pages, training academies and values statements sit prominently on these sites. Ownership is often a story of acquisitions, airline spin-offs and investment funds, so the guides that follow give dates and sources for who owns each company.

Five countries, one name.

In November 2026 the company’s website describes Çelebi Aviation as a group of about 9,000 employees working at more than 60 airports in five countries — Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Kenya and Türkiye — on three continents, serving about 400 airline customers. Its national pages list certifications including ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 and IATA’s ISAGO ground-operations audit for several units, and the Kenyan business names ISO 9001, ISAGO and GDP certification, the last for pharmaceutical logistics. The Kenyan unit also says it uses electric ground support equipment at Nairobi. These figures and standards are the company’s own statements.

In June 2026 the company announced that it had been included in Brand Finance’s 2026 “Türkiye 125” ranking of the country’s most valuable and strongest brands. Its home page carries a banner announcing a “new look” with the line “same Çelebi spirit,” alongside sections for ground handling, cargo and warehouse, general aviation and Platinum services, and separate cargo-tracking and baggage-tracking pages. A media kit offers the logo and photographs for download, and the careers section includes the Çelebi Aviation Academy and a “Life at Çelebi Aviation” page.

For a design guide, Çelebi shows how a ground handler founded in one country carries a single name across very different airports, from Budapest lounges to a Sumatran cargo terminal. Compare Havaş, another Turkish ground handler, and dnata. For this guide we use a deep blue, apron grey and a signal amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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