On March 31, I gained an e-mail from Norse Atlantic Airlines. The $940 flights for my upcoming spherical go back and forth to Rome have been canceled, it stated, and I had 14 days to request money back.
In the beginning, I didn’t panic. That started to modify when the corporate’s refund request web page wouldn’t load on two browsers throughout 3 gadgets. After Norse didn’t reply to a number of emails, I regarded for a telephone quantity. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I discovered dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer support.
The similar day, I filed a public data request with the Federal Industry Fee, which I was hoping would give me a greater concept of the way commonplace this enjoy was once. I in the end gained round 75 detailed court cases from individuals who had purchased or attempted to shop for tickets from the airline. Many described a customer support operation through which the shortcoming to get involved with a human created a vacuum that scammers seemed glad to step into. Of the 41 court cases that reported a greenback determine, 21 claimed they misplaced greater than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airlines does have human customer support employees, however in recent times, the airline has leaned right into a tech-forward means, deploying AI brokers to assist energy its operation.
“Generation will assist us have a better stage of availability and buyer give a boost to, whilst nonetheless keeping up low fares for extra other folks to experience commute between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the corporate’s leader buyer and communications officer, tells WIRED.
But if what I and dozens of other folks skilled is any indication, this model of shopper provider is time-consuming, irritating, and from time to time pricey.
The Long run Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airlines, which was once shaped in February 2021, has described itself as a “fashionable, long-haul, cheap airline” with a “lean” personnel. Early on, it applied a device from the client provider era corporate Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox of shopper provider queries. (According to archives of the corporate’s site, it doesn’t seem to have ever indexed a customer support quantity.)
In January 2025, the AI corporate Kindly wrote a weblog put up detailing the way it evolved a chatbot for Norse alternatingly referred to as “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse additionally got rid of the client give a boost to e-mail from its give a boost to web page as a way to make Odin the “number one give a boost to channel,” in line with the Kindly weblog put up.
Through January 2026, Norse had “sundown” the chatbot and changed it with its present AI agent, Freya. Satisfaction.ai, the corporate that evolved Freya, stated that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry solution charge “rose from 60 % to 80 %” inside two weeks of its advent.
“We see the way forward for our buyer give a boost to workforce as AI agent managers,” Norse’s leader product officer, Alf Lim, stated in a Satisfaction.ai weblog put up. Lim added that Freya is a “core a part of the workforce” at Norse.
Consistent with the weblog, Freya would permit Norse to “upskill” its buyer give a boost to unit into those AI agent managers, which can be described as “experts who steadily optimize, educate and step in when human-touch is needed.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a good fortune and now manages “99 % of inquiries from passengers.”
A Scammer’s Paradise
Most of the FTC court cases shared a commonplace theme: An individual, desiring to modify their flight or regulate their reserving, searched on-line for the Norse Atlantic Airlines telephone quantity. Eighteen of the FTC court cases explicitly claimed that the individual was once scammed when they Googled Norse’s customer support data and located rip-off web pages and make contact with numbers within the effects.
In some circumstances, consumers claimed they had been informed they owed cash for a flight they concept they already paid for. Different instances, they stated they had been informed that they needed to pay an exorbitant rate as a way to make a metamorphosis to their itinerary.
They handed alongside their bank card data, and in some circumstances, their social safety numbers. Quickly after, they stated, massive fees seemed on their bank card statements.
