GoKawiilOn March 31, I received an email from Norse Atlantic Airways. The $940 flights for my upcoming round trip to Rome had been canceled, it said, and I had 14 days to request a refund.
At first, I didn’t panic. That began to change when the company’s refund request page wouldn’t load on two browsers across three devices. After Norse didn’t respond to several emails, I looked for a phone number. There wasn’t one. On Reddit, I found dozens of posts about Norse’s allegedly haphazard customer service.
The 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 eventually received around 75 detailed complaints from people who had bought or tried to buy tickets from the airline. Many described a customer service operation in which the inability to get in touch with a human created a vacuum that scammers appeared happy to step into. Of the 41 complaints that reported a dollar figure, 21 claimed they lost more than $1,000.
Norse Atlantic Airways does have human customer service workers, but in recent years, the airline has leaned into a tech-forward approach, deploying AI agents to help power its operation.
“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, tells WIRED.
Yet if what I and dozens of other people experienced is any indication, this version of customer service is time-consuming, frustrating, and at times expensive.
The Future Is Now
Norse Atlantic Airways, which was formed in February 2021, has described itself as a “modern, long-haul, low-cost airline” with a “lean” workforce. Early on, it implemented a tool from the customer service technology company Sprinklr that created a “unified” inbox of customer service queries. (Based on archives of the company’s website, it doesn’t appear to have ever listed a customer service number.)
In January 2025, the AI company Kindly wrote a blog post detailing how it developed a chatbot for Norse alternatingly called “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman.” Norse also removed the customer support email from its support page in order to make Odin the “primary support channel,” according to the Kindly blog post.
By January 2026, Norse had “sunset” the chatbot and replaced it with its current AI agent, Freya. Delight.ai, the company that developed Freya, said that the airline’s no-human-intervention inquiry resolution rate “rose from 60 percent to 80 percent” within two weeks of its introduction.
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