Originally Posted by
SK AAR
Added: Your headline is misleading. ET gave you the reasonable choice to change ticket to MAD-BCN-MAD rather than just cancel/refund
It is not a "reasonable choice" by ET to offer OP to fly to an airport 500 km away.
OP, I'd recommend reaching out to an ET sales office and getting them to reroute you to BCN via an ET codeshare flight. For example, you could fly ADD-FRA on ET and then FRA-BCN on LH (ET codeshare). Give them the specific routing and flight numbers you want, and ask them to reissue your ticket with the updated routing.
This is also a good lesson on why you shouldn't book through OTAs - I'd be very surprised if you got the same runaround after booking directly with ET, but OTAs are very bad at effectively advocating for their passengers in the cases of schedule changes and similar. In fact, sometimes they have a financial incentive to
not provide what the customer wants, whether it be due to their commission structure or real or perceived risk of debit memos if they reissue a ticket in a way the airline doesn't like.