Norse Atlantic’s Cheap Flights Come With a Catch
▼ Summary
– On March 31, the author received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways canceling their $940 flights to Rome, with 14 days to request a refund.
– The author experienced technical issues with the refund page and received no response to emails, finding no phone number and numerous Reddit complaints about poor customer service.
– A public records request to the FTC revealed about 75 complaints, with 21 of 41 that reported a dollar figure claiming losses over $1,000, often due to scammers.
– Norse Atlantic Airways uses AI agents like Odin and Freya for customer service, with Freya now managing 99% of passenger inquiries, according to the company.
– Many FTC complaints described customers being scammed after Googling Norse’s phone number, encountering fake websites and phone numbers that demanded extra payments.
On March 31, an email from Norse Atlantic Airways landed in my inbox with unsettling news. My $940 round-trip tickets to Rome had been canceled, and I had just 14 days to request a refund.
Initially, I remained calm. That composure eroded quickly when the airline’s refund request page failed to load across two browsers and three devices. Several unanswered emails followed, and my search for a phone number turned up nothing. A dive into Reddit revealed dozens of posts detailing what many described as Norse’s erratic and unreliable customer service.
That same day, I filed a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), hoping to gauge how widespread this problem truly was. The response eventually arrived with roughly 75 detailed complaints from individuals who had purchased or attempted to buy tickets from the airline. A recurring theme emerged: the inability to reach a human representative created a void that scammers eagerly exploited. Of the 41 complaints that specified a dollar amount, 21 reported losing more than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airways does employ human customer service agents, but the airline has increasingly embraced a tech-first approach, relying on AI agents to drive its operations.
“Technology will help us have a higher level of availability and customer support, while still maintaining low fares for more people to enjoy travel between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, the company’s chief customer and communications officer, told WIRED.
Yet if my experience and those of dozens of others are any indication, this version of customer service proves time-consuming, frustrating, and occasionally costly.
The Future Is Now
Founded in February 2021, Norse Atlantic Airways has branded itself as a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it adopted a tool from the customer service technology company Sprinklr, creating a “unified” inbox for handling customer queries. Based on archived versions of its website, the airline appears to have never listed a customer service phone number.
In January 2025, the AI company Kindly published a blog post detailing its development of a chatbot for Norse, alternately named “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse also removed the customer support email from its support page, making Odin the “primary support channel,” according to the blog post.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and replaced it with its current AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the company behind Freya, reported that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry resolution rate “rose from 60 percent to 80 percent” within two weeks of its launch.
“We see the future of our customer support team as AI agent managers,” Norse’s chief product officer, Alf Lim, 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 enables Norse to “upskill” its customer support unit into these AI agent managers, described as “specialists who continuously optimize, train and step in when human-touch is required.”
Nordhagen tells WIRED that Freya has been a success and now manages “99 percent of inquiries from passengers.”
A Scammer’s Paradise
Many of the FTC complaints shared a troubling pattern. A customer, needing to change a flight or adjust a booking, would search online for the Norse Atlantic Airways phone number. Eighteen of the FTC complaints explicitly stated that the person was scammed after Googling Norse’s customer service information, finding fraudulent websites and phone numbers in the search results.
In some cases, customers claimed they were told they owed money for a flight they believed they had already paid for. In others, they said they were informed they had to pay an exorbitant fee to make a simple change to their itinerary.
(Source: Wired)