March 31st I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. It said $940 flights for my upcoming roundtrip to Rome were canceled and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first I didn’t panic. This started to change when the refund request page failed to load in two browsers on three devices. Since Norse did not respond to several emails, I started looking for a phone number. There wasn’t a single one. I found dozens on Reddit posts about Norse’s allegedly messy customer service.
That same day, I filed a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission, which I hoped would give me a better idea of how widespread this experience was. Ultimately, I received approximately 75 detailed complaints from people who had purchased or attempted to purchase tickets on this airline. Many people described a customer service operation where the inability to contact a human created a vacuum into which fraudsters seemed eager to step. Of the 41 complaints that listed a dollar amount, 21 claimed they lost more than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airways employs customer service staff, but in recent years the airline has embraced technological advancements by deploying AI agents to aid its operations.
“Technology will help us provide higher levels of accessibility and customer service while keeping prices low, so more people can travel between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the company’s chief customer and communications officer, tells WIRED.
However, if what I and dozens of others have experienced is any indication, this version of customer service is time-consuming, frustrating, and sometimes high-priced.
The future is now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was established in February 2021has described itself as a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with “lean” labor force. In the beginning this implemented a tool from customer service technology company Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox for customer service inquiries. (Based on the company’s website archives, it appears that a customer service number was never provided.)
In January 2025, artificial intelligence company Kindly wrote: blog publish a post detailing how a chatbot was developed for the Nordic language, alternately called “Odin” Or “Odin’s wingman” Norwegian too REMOVED customer support email from the support site to make Odin its “primary support channel,” according to a post on the Kindly blog.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” chatbot and replaced it with the current AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the company that developed Freya, he said that the resolution rate for investigations that did not require human intervention “increased from 60 to 80 percent” within two weeks of their introduction.
“We see the future of our customer service team as AI agent managers,” Norse Chief Product Officer Alf Lim he 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 enable Norse to “upskill” its customer service unit into AI agent managers, who are described as “specialists who continually optimize, train, and step in when a human touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been successful and now manages “99 percent of passenger inquiries.”
A fraudster’s paradise
Many of the complaints filed by the FTC had a common theme: A person looking to change a flight or adjust a reservation searched the Internet for Norse Atlantic Airways’ phone number. Eighteen of the FTC complaints specifically stated that an individual was defrauded after searching Google for Norse customer service information and finding fraudulent websites and phone numbers in the results.
In some cases, customers said they were told they owed money for a flight they thought they had already paid for. On another occasion, they claimed they were told they had to pay an exorbitant fee to make a change to their itinerary.