As reported in Forbes, British Airways does some marketing with Google Earth — or is it the other way round?:-)

There’s two parts to this campaign: On BA’s website, a Google Earth layer that shows prices for different destinations; and a lovely television commercial by BA for the UK market that features Google earth (via Kreativt Forum.) Here is the video.

While BA’s layer is not the most efficient way to book flights if you know where you want to go, it is undeniably an entertaining way to plan serendipitously. And the overlay also uses KML interestingly, in that rolling over an icon switches it to another image. (The KML tags involved are StyleMap, Pair, Key and StyleURL — copy a placemark in Google Earth and paste it into a text editor to see the syntax at work.)