Aviasales through the lens of Elaboration Likelihood Model and Gatekeeping Theory

Disclaimer

This research project contains references to entities and individuals whose legal status in the Russian Federation requires acknowledgment:

— Yuri Dud — included in the registry of foreign agents in the Russian Federation.

Aviasales — analysis of the brand’s communication strategy through the lens of Elaboration Likelihood Model and Gatekeeping Theory.

1. Introduction 2. Communication Channels 3. Theoretical Framework — Gatekeeping; — ELM 4. Analysis — Gatekeeping; — ELM 5. Conclusion & Recommendations 6. Sources

What Aviasales Is

Aviasales is a Russian flight metasearch engine that aggregates offers from 728 airlines, 200 ticket agencies, and 5 booking systems into one interface. The brand was launched in 2007 by programmer Konstantin Kalinov as a personal blog about airline sales, grew into a service in 2008, and became the most recognizable brand in its category by the 2020s. Today: around 18 million monthly users, and a branded search query that on Yandex outranks the generic «авиабилеты».

The brand’s core positioning is captured in one self-description: «a smart search engine for cheap tickets that speaks like a human.» Simplicity, speed, affordability, and humor — the four pillars on which everything else rests.

Tone of voice + audience

According to communications director Yanis Dzenis, the brand «jokes about everything except extreme sports and falling planes.» Aviasales consciously avoids corporate language and pathos — humor is not decoration, but a core part of the product.

The target audience is not a single segment but two overlapping generations the brand speaks to in different voices:

— Zoomers (15-27) — the audience of TikTok, Instagram*, and meme culture. They come for the brand’s mascots (the booby bird, the traveling duck, Aviaslav) and absurdist humor. Communication is short, visual, and ironic.

— The older generation (35+) — the audience of TV, long-form YouTube, email newsletters, and postcards from Baba Tonya. Here the brand speaks more calmly, with recognizable stylistics and without TikTok absurdism.

— Between them sits the main solvent audience aged 25-45, reached through Telegram, YouTube blogger integrations, and expert content in the PSZHR magazine.

Aviasales is one of the few Russian brands that successfully speaks to several generations at once without reducing them to a lowest common denominator.

Channels overview

Aviasales builds a multi-channel ecosystem in which each platform is a standalone tool with its own content, format, and voice. The principle is clear: not cross-posting, but adaptation to the audience of each platform.

— TikTok — short vertical humor, brand characters (the booby bird, Aviaslav, the traveling duck — a viral 2025 trend with 40M+ views) — Twitter / X — quick reactions to current events in real time — Telegram — the brand’s flagship channel (≈ 284,000 subscribers), combining short situational posts and extended pieces with the brand’s own analytics — YouTube — blogger integrations (60+ partnerships including Dud, Ptushkin, Usachev, Lapenko) and long-form travel content — TV — selective campaigns, calmer humor, focus on brand recognition

Beyond external platforms, the brand develops its own media — the PSZHR travel magazine, service bots (Cheap Tickets Bot, Baba Tonya bot), and branded sticker packs on VK and Telegram. Aviasales does not just use existing platforms — it builds its own infrastructure on top of them.

This principle produces both a variety of message formats and a variety of ways the audience processes them — the central theme of our analysis in section 4.

Influencers + PR + own data

Aviasales’s brand marketing relies on collaboration with bloggers without a strict brief. The principle: «tell people about us the way you think makes sense.» Two-thirds of partnerships are repeat collaborations; the brand consciously chooses bloggers close to the audience, not to the topic.

At the PR level, four lines of action:

— Situational PR (news-jacking) — instant reactions to current events that media outlets pick up as content. Industry publications have called Aviasales «the king of situational meme-marketing in Russia.»

— TV as tactical amplifier — the brand spends little on TV, but in 2024 a campaign produced a rare effect: the branded query «Aviasales» overtook the generic «авиабилеты» on Yandex.

— Open data — statistics on destinations and prices, used by partners (such as Pulkovo Airport) and federal media. This turns Aviasales from an object of travel journalism into a source for it.

— Outdoor and ambient media — out-of-home advertising that becomes an art object: airport bathrooms, billboard jokes, festival performances (a rave at Pulkovo, projections at Ural Music Night).

Two facts about Aviasales summarize the principle that will guide our analysis.

First — the brand reacts to information events faster than most traditional media. Second — federal outlets increasingly cite Aviasales’s own data as their primary source on travel topics.

Aviasales simultaneously reacts to current events and creates them — a dual role we will analyze in sections 3 and 4 through the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Gatekeeping Theory.

The central route is the path of cognitive processing. It is used when a person has high motivation and the ability to analyze information. The audience carefully examines the message, weighing logic, facts, and evidence — and consciously changes opinion. Opinions formed this way are stable and determine future behavior.

The peripheral route is used when motivation is low or the opportunity to engage deeply is absent. A person looks for «shortcuts» to make a decision. Attention is not focused on the substance of arguments but on superficial factors: the source’s appearance, emotions, expert authority, humor, or colorful design. Opinions formed this way change quickly — they are superficial, situational, and easily replaced.

The route of message processing depends on two key factors: motivation (how important, interesting, and relevant a topic is to a person) and ability (whether a person has the knowledge, time, and capacity to reflect on information).

The concept rests on the idea that not all available information can be communicated to the public. Gatekeepers evaluate and prioritize content, deciding what counts as relevant, newsworthy, accurate, or valuable for their audience. This influences not only what information people receive but also how issues are framed and understood.

Gatekeeping serves several important functions: managing the flow of information, maintaining content quality, and helping audiences navigate large volumes of data. Because gatekeeping decisions are influenced by institutional values and individual perspectives, the process also shapes public opinion and affects which viewpoints receive attention. In the digital age, algorithms and social media platforms increasingly complement traditional human gatekeepers.

At the level of the peripheral route, Aviasales generates high brand recognition and emotional sympathy through its strong communication identity. The brand has gone beyond the traditional travel service and turned into a media outlet with its own tone of voice. Its communication is built on irony, internet memes, conversational intonation, self-irony, and situational humor. This style makes the brand «yours» for a young audience and reduces the distance between company and user.

The clearest examples are the brand’s witty replies in user comments — short emotional punches (humor, sarcasm, situational wit) that build affinity with the brand voice. The user does not receive product information; they receive entertainment. Each reply collects hundreds of likes, transforming a service interaction into shareable content. The consumer does not rationally analyze the benefits of the service, evaluate search algorithms, or check the quality of the booking system — they react primarily to an emotional stimulus. By ELM logic, this is a typical example of peripheral persuasion, in which the brand relationship is formed through external signals rather than message content.

Tone of voice plays a particularly important role in the Aviasales strategy. The brand consistently rejects corporate language and speaks to the audience as a participant in internet culture. This creates trust: the user perceives the brand as more understandable, human, and close in values. Even when such communication is not directly related to product quality, it creates a positive attitude and increases the probability of choosing the service in the future.

In addition, Aviasales actively uses viral mechanics: provocative posts, situational marketing, short humorous videos, and memes. The purpose of such communications is not to explain product benefits in detail, but to create a quick emotional response and high brand retention.

The brand even openly acknowledges its own promotional nature inside the joke — directly stating «this is an Aviasales ad» — and this self-irony itself becomes a peripheral cue. The audience accepts the message precisely because it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is.

Through these mechanics, the peripheral route helps Aviasales keep the audience engaged in conditions of information overload and high competition in the digital environment.

The product interface itself functions as central-route communication. The main search («Тут покупают дешёвые авиабилеты») delivers a literal, unambiguous promise. The app’s onboarding screens articulate concrete rational benefits — finding cheap tickets, tracking price drops, finding hotels without markups — making the value proposition fully transparent.

The service offers users a wide range of rational advantages: transparent price comparison, a low-price calendar, flexible search parameters, ticket-price tracking, and a broad selection of routes. All of these elements reduce cognitive load and help people make fact-based decisions. The brand effectively provides the audience with tools for self-analysis — fully consistent with the central route logic in the ELM model.

Aviasales’s expert content is an additional element of the central route. The brand publishes travel guides, route recommendations, price analysis, ticket-buying tips, and travel materials on its website. This content enhances the company’s perception as a category expert and reinforces a sense of brand competence. For the user, this becomes a rational confirmation that the service actually helps them make better and more informed decisions.

From the perspective of the Elaboration Likelihood Model, Aviasales’s key strength lies in the combination of two persuasive pathways. The peripheral route allows the brand to quickly capture audience attention and form emotional attachments. The central route then transforms that initial sympathy into sustained trust and long-term loyalty.

This dual structure explains a behavior that often confuses competitors: Aviasales jokes around like a meme account, but when the user actually wants to buy a ticket, the system delivers on the rational promise. The brand has built a coherent persuasive architecture that operates across the full range of user engagement.

Aviasales’s functionality clearly demonstrates the core functions of gatekeeping. Every day, the service collects a vast volume of information from airlines, agencies, and travel platforms worldwide. A user is physically unable to process such a volume independently, so the service takes on this task. After receiving a request, the system analyzes available flight options and selects only those offers that meet the specified parameters: destination, dates, budget, and number of stops.

Aviasales does not simply provide information — it acts as an intermediary between the air travel market and the consumer. The search and filter interfaces are gatekeeping made visible: «Hot tickets from Moscow» is the brand’s curated selection, where Aviasales itself decides which destinations and prices deserve front-page attention. The flight results page sorts options in a specific order, signaling priority to the user. What the user sees is the result of the brand’s filtering, not the full dataset. This process reduces information overload and makes the ticket search measurably more efficient.

The service goes beyond displaying search results. Aviasales directs users to partner and agency websites where the purchase can be completed on the most favorable terms. This too is gatekeeping: users gain access only to options that have already been pre-screened and deemed relevant to their search. As a result, they save not only money but also time that would otherwise be spent independently comparing dozens of websites and offers.

Gatekeeping Theory is evident not only in the service itself but also in the company’s advertising efforts. Aviasales’s marketing communications are tailored to the specific characteristics of various platforms and audiences. Before publishing advertising materials, the company analyzes where its target audience is located, what content format it prefers, and which messages will be most effective. This produces an additional layer of filtering: different user groups receive different advertising messages from the same brand.

This is especially visible in communication with the younger audience. Aviasales is widely known for its non-standard approach to advertising on social media and short-video platforms. The brand’s TikTok output — Aviaslav, the booby bird, the traveling duck, and short meme videos — illustrates gatekeeping by format. The brand has filtered what the young audience needs to see: not destinations or prices, but visual entertainment that signals cultural belonging. The format aligns with the content-consumption patterns of young users, who prefer to obtain information quickly and make decisions inside a constant information flow. The product is invisible; the brand presence is total.

For older audiences, the brand uses entirely different communication mechanisms. Television commercials, online media, and information portals follow a more measured approach: emphasizing service reliability, competitive prices, and ease of searching for tickets. Gatekeeping operates here too — the same brand information is distributed across multiple channels and adapted to the expectations of each consumer group.

A striking illustration is the brand’s recent television ad — a cinematic, story-driven scene set inside an airliner cabin, with actors representing several age groups. Slow pace, cinematic framing, mature actors, no meme aesthetics — the opposite of the TikTok output. The same brand that joked through Aviaslav on TikTok now speaks in the visual language of a classical commercial. Even the recurring character — the traveling duck — appears in both formats, but the framing changes completely. The brand has filtered what the older audience needs to see: a calm story about a service rather than an absurdist sketch. Same brand, two completely different acts of gatekeeping.

Aviasales operates on multiple persuasive levels at once — ELM’s peripheral and central routes, Gatekeeping’s filtering and curation. The branded query «Aviasales» overtaking the generic «авиабилеты» on Yandex confirms the dual architecture works.

Four refinements would strengthen it further.

ELM. — Bridge the two audiences through central-route content. PSZHR and expert content are audience-neutral; they could unify the otherwise separate streams of Aviaslav (zoomers) and the TV ad (older users). — Manage peripheral fatigue. The self-aware ad format works because it surprises — diversifying beyond a single comic register protects its effectiveness.

Gatekeeping. — Demystify the curation logic. Adding light transparency to «Hot tickets» and search ordering («trending this week», «popular in Moscow») would convert filtering from a black box into trust-building. — Productize the source role. The brand is already cited by RBC and Pulkovo Airport — formalizing this into quarterly reports or a trend bulletin would codify the authority and generate evergreen press.