This is an utterly unfair practice, but it is indeed very common in the legacy carriers. The reason it doesn't happen with Ryanair and Easyjet is that they don't really sell return tickets..they sell two single tickets, one each way. It is packaged as a return, but the pricing is based on two one way tickets, and if you cancel or no show for one, it will not automatically cancel the other. The reason given why Austrian, Lufthansa, Air France and BA for example do cancel them is that they offer so called dynamic pricing to attract "hub" customers. Let me give you an example\;
BA may charge £500 for a return ticket from London to Hong Kong
AirFrance may also charge £500 for a return ticket from Paris to Hong Kong
In order for BA to win some transfer business from Paris to Hong Kong via London, their price has to be better than £500, because why would you go through the hassle of changing in London if you can go direct for the same price. So BA price the ticket from Paris to Hong Kong at £420.
This all went swimmingly until the internet came along. Suddenly, customer realised they would save significant sums of money by booking a ticket from Paris to Hong Kong via London, throwing away the Paris to London portion of the ticket and boarding in London.
In addition, because single fares are typically purchased by business travellers (and tickets are priced on demand, not on costs) the airlines often had single fares which were higher than returns. The same rules applied. So Austrian might charge £100 return for a flight from Vienna to London to encourage volume. However, the cost of a single from London to Vienna could be £200. To stop people buying the return for £100 and just throwing away the first leg, the airlines introduced a requirement that you must have completed the first leg of the journey to make the second leg valid.
There is no real justification for this ridiculous and byzantine pricing, other than maintaining the airlines right to fleece customers. Sadly, no regulator has ever tried to stop this practice and I think it is something we just have to live with. BA appear to have dropped it for most domestic and European flights and seem to be selling tickets on the same basis as the low costs.. however, it remains for long haul.
There is little you can do... except avoid the legacy carriers for intra-european flights and use low costs.
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