On March 31, I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming round trip to Rome had been canceled, it said, and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first, I didn’t panic. That began to change when the company’s refund request page wouldn’t load on two browsers across three devices. After Norse didn’t respond to several emails, I looked for a phone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I found dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer service.
The same day, I filed a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission, which I hoped would give me a better idea of how common this experience was. I eventually received around 75 detailed complaints from people who had bought or tried to buy tickets from the airline. Many described a customer service operation in which the inability to get in touch with a human created a vacuum that scammers appeared happy to step into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a dollar figure, 21 claimed they lost more than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airways does have human customer service workers, but in recent years, the airline has leaned into a tech-forward approach, deploying AI agents to help power its operation.
“Technology will help us have a higher level of availability and customer support, while still maintaining low fares for more people to enjoy travel between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the company’s chief customer and communications officer, tells WIRED.
Yet if what I and dozens of other people experienced is any indication, this version of customer service is time-consuming, frustrating, and at times expensive.
The Future Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was formed in February 2021, has described itself as a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it implemented a tool from the customer service technology company Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox of customer service queries. (Based on archives of the company’s website, it doesn’t appear to have ever listed a customer service number.)
In January 2025, the AI company Kindly wrote a blog post detailing how it developed a chatbot for Norse alternatingly called “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse also removed the customer support email from its support page in order to make Odin the “primary support channel,” according to the Kindly blog post.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and replaced it with its current AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the company that developed Freya, said that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry resolution rate “rose from 60 percent to 80 percent” within two weeks of its introduction.
“We see the future of our customer support team as AI agent managers,” Norse’s chief product officer, Alf Lim, said in a Delight.ai blog post. Lim added that Freya is a “core part of the team” at Norse.
According to the blog, Freya would allow Norse to “upskill” its customer support unit into these AI agent managers, which are described as “specialists who continuously optimize, train and step in when human-touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a success and now manages “99 percent of inquiries from passengers.”
A Scammer’s Paradise
Many of the FTC complaints shared a common theme: A person, needing to change their flight or adjust their booking, searched online for the Norse Atlantic Airways phone number. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly claimed that the person was scammed after they Googled Norse’s customer service information and found scam websites and phone numbers in the results.
In some cases, customers claimed they were told they owed money for a flight they thought they already paid for. Other times, they said they were told that they had to pay an exorbitant fee in order to make a change to their itinerary.
