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 stated, and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first, I didn’t panic. That started to change when the firm’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 regarded 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 information request with the Federal Commerce Fee, which I hoped would give me a greater concept of how frequent 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 by which the incapability 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 staff, however lately, 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 assist, whereas nonetheless sustaining low fares for extra folks to get pleasure from journey between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the firm’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 occasions costly.
The Future Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was fashioned 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 firm’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 publish detailing the way it developed a chatbot for Norse alternatingly referred to as “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse additionally removed the buyer assist e-mail from its assist web page so as to make Odin the “major assist channel,” in accordance to the Kindly weblog publish.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and changed it with its present AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the firm that developed Freya, said that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry decision price “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 publish. Lim added that Freya is a “core a part of the group” at Norse.
In accordance to the weblog, Freya would enable Norse to “upskill” its buyer assist unit into these AI agent managers, which are described as “specialists who repeatedly optimize, prepare and step in when human-touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a hit 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 change their flight or regulate 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 information and located rip-off web sites and telephone numbers in the outcomes.
In some instances, prospects claimed they had been informed they owed cash for a flight they thought they already paid for. Different occasions, they stated they had been informed that that they had to pay an exorbitant charge so as to make a change to their itinerary.
They handed alongside their bank card information, and in some instances, their social safety numbers. Quickly after, they stated, enormous costs appeared on their bank card statements.
Disclaimer: This article is sourced from external platforms. OverBeta has not independently verified the information. Readers are advised to verify details before relying on them.
