On March 31, I obtained an electronic mail from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming spherical journey to Rome had been canceled, it stated, and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first, I didn’t panic. That started to alter when the corporate’s refund request web page wouldn’t load on two browsers throughout three gadgets. After Norse didn’t reply to a number of emails, I seemed for a telephone quantity. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I discovered dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer support.
The identical day, I filed a public data request with the Federal Commerce Fee, which I hoped would give me a greater concept of how frequent this expertise was. I ultimately obtained round 75 detailed complaints from individuals who had purchased or tried to purchase tickets from the airline. Many described a customer support operation by which the lack to get in contact with a human created a vacuum that scammers appeared completely satisfied to step into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a greenback determine, 21 claimed they misplaced greater than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airways does have human customer support employees, however in recent times, the airline has leaned right into a tech-forward strategy, deploying AI brokers to assist energy its operation.
“Expertise will assist us have a better degree of availability and buyer help, whereas nonetheless sustaining low fares for extra folks to get pleasure from journey between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the corporate’s chief buyer and communications officer, tells WIRED.
But if what I and dozens of different folks skilled is any indication, this model of customer support is time-consuming, irritating, and at instances costly.
The Future Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was fashioned in February 2021, has described itself as a “trendy, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it implemented a device from the customer support expertise firm Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox of customer support queries. (Primarily based on archives of the corporate’s web site, it doesn’t seem to have ever listed a customer support quantity.)
In January 2025, the AI firm Kindly wrote a blog put up detailing the way it developed a chatbot for Norse alternatingly known as “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse additionally removed the shopper help electronic mail from its help web page to be able to make Odin the “major help channel,” in accordance with the Kindly weblog put up.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and changed it with its present AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the corporate that developed Freya, said that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry decision charge “rose from 60 p.c to 80 p.c” inside two weeks of its introduction.
“We see the way forward for our buyer help group as AI agent managers,” Norse’s chief product officer, Alf Lim, said in a Delight.ai weblog put up. Lim added that Freya is a “core a part of the group” at Norse.
In keeping with the weblog, Freya would permit Norse to “upskill” its buyer help unit into these AI agent managers, that are described as “specialists who constantly optimize, practice and step in when human-touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a hit and now manages “99 p.c of inquiries from passengers.”
A Scammer’s Paradise
Lots of the FTC complaints shared a standard theme: An individual, needing to alter their flight or alter their reserving, searched on-line for the Norse Atlantic Airways telephone quantity. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly claimed that the individual was scammed after they Googled Norse’s customer support info and located rip-off web sites and telephone numbers within the outcomes.
In some circumstances, prospects claimed they had been informed they owed cash for a flight they thought they already paid for. Different instances, they stated they had been informed that they needed to pay an exorbitant price to be able to make a change to their itinerary.
