This would be a serious downgrade in the Elite travel experience. As a 1K, I expect the airline to bend over backwards to ensure I am protected in case of a misconnect, and not left to fend for myself at the airport, competing with mobs of non-status customers for precious seats.

Having said that, as a rule I always call reservations back to clean up the record once I'm either seated on my original flight or the new flight to avoid issues like these, and many agents actually request that I do so.

However, how hard is it really to add logic to the system to auto-cancel only the segment not taken on the basis of the boarding pass scan. If the BP is scanned for the original flight, then auto cancel the protected segment...if the BP is scanned on the protected segment, auto cancel the original flight, preserve downline segments and clean up the record.

It's simple if-then-else logic - instead of screwing the customer, why not program it in??