Abstract: A pre-swirl system can provide high-quality cooling air for gas turbine blades. In order to improve the temperature drop performance of the pre-swirl system, the influence mechanism and solution scheme are proposed to reveal the insignificant temperature drop of the original model by theoretical derivations. A blade-shaped leading-edge receiver hole is designed to enhance the system performance. Furthermore, the thermodynamic and aerodynamic characteristics are compared for the systems using the blade-shaped receiver hole and the original receiver hole, respectively. The results show that the matching of rotor and stator parts in the pre-swirl cavity is an important factor influencing the system performance. The blade-shaped receiver hole can better solve the matching problem. Compared with the system using the original receiver hole, the pre-swirl cavity pressure of the system with blade-shaped receiver hole is reduced from 640.2 kPa to 533.0 kPa under the condition of the specific mass flow rate and pressure of the supplied air, which is decreased by 16.7%. The system using the blade-shaped receiver hole has the positive system temperature drop, the temperature drop efficiency increases from −30% to 55%, and the range of temperature drop is 13.56 K. The specific power consumption decreases by 40.8% from 6720 J/kg to 3979 J/kg.