I agree with you that the airline makes out in this case. But they are after the scammers and unfortunately they have programmed their system this way.
If you choose to drive or take alternate transportation on any segment of your itinerary, all subsequent segments will auto-cancel. At least at NWA. I'm betting all majors are the same. What they are trying to prevent is people buying a ticket that is cheaper from one market and using it to only fly part of a trip.
It sounds stupid, I agree. Let's use your case. Your kids flew from where you are to ORD then drove to Springfield. How does the airline know the kids just didn't get off in ORD? Believe it or not, sometimes flights to further destinations are cheaper than to just ORD to draw the market. So people will buy the ticket with a further destination at a cheaper price with no intention of using it. So to counteract this, the airlines put the auto cancel measure in. But in my experience, it has worked like crap cuz sometimes a case like yours comes up and the agent helping the passenger doesn't clean up the reservation to show what happened.
I don't know if that makes any sense or not. To me it does but I'm not a good teacher.
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