Norse Atlantic Airways offers cheap tickets. There is a catch

On March 31, I received an email from Norris Atlantic Airlines. She said $940 worth of flights for my upcoming round trip to Rome had been cancelled, and I had 14 days to request a refund.

At first, I didn’t panic. That started to change when the company’s refund request page wouldn’t load in two browsers across three devices. After Norris didn’t respond to several emails, I looked up a phone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I found dozens of Supports About Norse’s alleged random 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 common this experience was. I ultimately received about 75 detailed complaints from people who had purchased or attempted to purchase tickets from the airline. Many described a customer service operation in which the inability to contact a human created a vacuum that scammers seemed happy to step into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a dollar figure, 21 claimed to have lost more than $1,000.

Norse Atlantic Airways has human staff to serve customers, but in recent years, the airline has taken a technology-forward approach, deploying artificial intelligence agents to help run its operations.

“Technology will help us have a higher level of availability and customer support, while continuing to keep prices low for more people to enjoy intercontinental travel,” Bard Nordhagen, the company’s chief customer and communications officer, told WIRED.

However, if what I and dozens of others experienced is any indication, this version of customer service is time-consuming, frustrating, and sometimes expensive.

The future is now

Norris Atlantic Airlines, founded in February 2021he has described itself as a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with “slim“Manpower. Early on, that was outlet A tool from customer service technology company Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox for customer service inquiries. (Based on archives of the company’s website, it doesn’t appear to have listed a customer service number at all.)

In January 2025, the AI ​​company Kindly wrote a Blog A post detailing how to develop a chatbot for Norse called “Alternately”Odin“or”Odin Wingman“. Norris too It has been removed Customer support emailed from its support page in order to make Odin its “primary support channel,” according to Kindly’s blog post.

By January 2026, Nourse had “sunsetchatbot and replaced it with its existing AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the company that developed Freya, He said The airline’s resolution rate for non-human intervention inquiries “increased from 60 percent to 80 percent” within two weeks of its introduction.

“We see the future of our customer support team as managers of AI agents,” said Alf Lim, Chief Product Officer at Norse. He said In a Delight.ai blog post. Lim added that Freya is a “key part of the team” at Norris.

According to the blog, Freya will allow Norse to “evolve” its customer support unit into managers of these AI agents, which are described as “specialists who continually improve, train, and intervene when the human touch is required.”

Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been successful and now handles “99 percent of inquiries from passengers.”

Trickster’s paradise

Many FTC complaints share a common theme: A person, needing to change his flight or modify his reservation, searched online for the Norse Atlantic Airways phone number. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly claimed that a person had been defrauded after they Googled Norse customer service information and found fraudulent websites and phone numbers in the results.

In some cases, customers claimed they were told they owed money for a trip they thought they had already paid for. Other times, they said they were told they had to pay exorbitant fees in order to change their itinerary.