BA opens highlife website. Good start. But much more needed

Read in newmediaage that British Airways has launched a dedicated content website - BAhighlife.com - based on the years and years (35) of content from their inflight magazine highlife. This is a great move by BA. Other than the website architecture and support this is a very low cost means for BA to generate organic traffic from travel searches. Assuming they have indexed the content properly (and from my initial glances it looks like they have) they will also be able to generate traffic outside of pure traveller review searches (ie in sport, entertainment etc). Good move by BA.

But the launch here is still a dramatic under-utlisation of a enourmous amount of good quality editorial content. Once a consumer lands on a article/page at BAhighlife.com this is what they can do with it:

• read it;
  
• email it; or
• bookmark it.

That is it. If BA wants to make the most out of this then the customer should be able to:

• Share: share with social networking site (digg, facebook, reddit);
• Comment: make comments, join in a conversation about the article;
• Find more: find other related content selected by consumers, from the same author, about the same destination;
• Save: save favourite stories on a profile page or trip plan page;
• Use: use all information gather to build up a trip plan; and
  
• Book: have contextual links to relevant trip itineraries.

In other words build an interaction and community service that drives brand and bookings rather than a news service that adds a little bit of traffic and ad sales rev.

Good start. More needed.