On March 31, I acquired an e mail from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming spherical journey to Rome had been canceled, it mentioned, and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first, I didn’t panic. That started to vary 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 cellphone 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 information request with the Federal Commerce Fee, which I hoped would give me a greater concept of how widespread this expertise was. I finally acquired round 75 detailed complaints from individuals who had purchased or tried to purchase tickets from the airline. Many described a customer support operation through which the lack to get in contact with a human created a vacuum that scammers appeared joyful 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 staff, however in recent times, the airline has leaned right into a tech-forward method, deploying AI brokers to assist energy its operation.
“Know-how will assist us have a better stage of availability and buyer assist, whereas nonetheless sustaining low fares for extra individuals to take pleasure in journey between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the corporate’s chief buyer and communications officer, tells WIRED.
But if what I and dozens of different individuals skilled is any indication, this model of customer support is time-consuming, irritating, and at occasions costly.
The Future Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was shaped in February 2021, has described itself as a “fashionable, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it implemented a device from the customer support know-how 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 referred to as “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse additionally removed the client assist e mail from its assist web page with a view to make Odin the “major assist channel,” in line 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 % to 80 %” inside two weeks of its introduction.
“We see the way forward for our buyer assist 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 response to the weblog, Freya would permit Norse to “upskill” its buyer assist unit into these AI agent managers, that are described as “specialists who repeatedly optimize, practice and step in when human-touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been successful and now manages “99 % of inquiries from passengers.”
A Scammer’s Paradise
Lots of the FTC complaints shared a standard theme: An individual, needing to vary their flight or regulate their reserving, searched on-line for the Norse Atlantic Airways cellphone quantity. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly claimed that the particular person was scammed after they Googled Norse’s customer support info and located rip-off web sites and cellphone numbers within the outcomes.
In some instances, clients claimed they had been advised they owed cash for a flight they thought they already paid for. Different occasions, they mentioned they had been advised that they needed to pay an exorbitant payment with a view to make a change to their itinerary.
