The AI-Powered Airline That Abandoned Human Support Left Passengers Easy Prey for Scammers

On March 31, an alert landed in my inbox from Norse Atlantic Airways: my upcoming $940 round-trip flight to Rome had been canceled, and I had exactly 14 days to submit a formal refund request. I did not panic at first — that calm quickly dissolved when the airline’s dedicated refund portal refused to load, no matter which of three devices or two separate web browsers I tested. After multiple follow-up emails to public support addresses went completely unanswered, I searched for a customer service phone number to resolve the issue directly. No such number existed.

I soon found dozens of threads on Reddit from other passengers complaining about the airline’s chaotic, unreachable support team, and decided to file a public records request with the Federal Trade Commission to gauge how widespread these frustrations were. I eventually received 75 detailed complaints from passengers who had purchased or attempted to buy tickets from Norse, the vast majority of which described a total absence of accessible human support that scammers had rushed to exploit. Of the 41 complaints that included specific figures for financial losses, 21 reported losing more than $1,000 total.

---

Norse’s All-In Bet on AI-First Automated Support

The airline does employ a small team of human customer service staff, but the 2021-founded self-described “lean, long-haul low-cost carrier” has leaned heavily on AI-powered tools in recent years to streamline operations. “Technology helps us deliver far more consistent, high-availability customer support while keeping fares low, so more people can afford to travel between continents,” Bård Nordhagen, Norse’s chief customer and communications officer, told WIRED.

Their shift to fully automated support unfolded gradually: early in its operation, Norse rolled out a unified support inbox tool built by customer service tech firm Sprinklr, and archived versions of its public website confirm the carrier never published a public customer service phone number at any point. In January 2025, AI vendor Kindly published a blog post detailing the custom chatbot it built for Norse, alternately named “Odin” or “Odin’s Wingman”. The airline also removed its public customer support email from its help page at that time, to make the chatbot the official primary point of contact for all passengers.

By January 2026, Norse retired the Odin bot and replaced it with its current AI support agent, Freya, built by Delight.ai. The vendor shared that within two weeks of Freya’s launch, the share of passenger inquiries resolved without any human intervention jumped from 60% to 80%. “We see the future of our support team as AI agent managers,” Norse’s chief product officer Alf Lim noted in a Delight.ai blog post at the time, adding that Freya was a “core part of the team”. The post outlined plans to “upskill” existing support staff into specialized roles that only step in to optimize AI performance or handle cases that explicitly require human touch. Nordhagen now confirms Freya is a runaway internal success, and handles 99% of all passenger inquiries today.

For me and dozens of other impacted passengers, however, this AI-first model proved overwhelmingly time-consuming, deeply frustrating, and often directly costly.

---

A Support Void That Scammers Have Flocked To

Nearly all the FTC complaints shared a identical core pain point: when passengers hit a wall with the AI bot and could not resolve booking changes, refunds, or unexpected travel disruptions, they turned to Google to search for a real Norse customer service phone line. 18 of the 75 filings explicitly state that passengers were targeted by scammers immediately after searching for that contact information, with fake airline support phone numbers and scam sites ranking at the very top of Google’s results.

Scammers would pose as official airline representatives, tell passengers they owed hidden fees for itinerary changes or even for flights they had already paid in full, then collect their credit card details and in some cases social security numbers, before running up massive unauthorized charges. One March 2025 complaint came from a pair of 72 and 79 year old passengers who tried to book tickets over the phone with a scammer, who claimed their first three credit card payments had failed to process. They handed over their date of birth and the last four digits of their SSN, and woke up to an unauthorized $1,258.88 charge before they could lock their cards. “We are terrified, please help,” they wrote in their formal filing.

This scam wave has become so widespread that Norse’s official website now displays a large, high-visibility banner warning users about “online scam and fraud”. But even at time of writing, a Google search for “Norse Atlantic airways phone number” pulls up three Yelp pages listing two different contact numbers, both of which are confirmed scams. When WIRED called the first number, a man claimed to represent Star Alliance, a global 26-airline network that does not count Norse as a member — a Star Alliance official later confirmed the number is in no way affiliated with the group. The second number connected to a man who said he worked for “Flight Travel Portal”, a service with no verifiable public existence, who shrugged off reports his line was a scam, saying “people online can say whatever they want”.

Even passengers who avoided scammers faced major unexpected costs: a Los Angeles-based customer reported being denied boarding on a Norse Rome to LA flight, with no official Norse staff present at the Italian airport, only contracted workers who had no way to reach the airline headquarters. Trapped with a young child, they were forced to book exorbitant last-minute replacement flights to avoid being stranded, with no way to process a refund or rebook via the airline’s only available chatbot. Many passengers who booked via third-party platforms including Priceline, Affirm, or travel insurance provider Xcover found none of those parties would step in to help, all redirecting them back to the unreachable airline.

---

The Hidden Price of AI-Driven Cost Cutting

Norse’s push for full automation is explicitly tied to aggressive cost-reduction targets. On a 2024 earnings call, then-CEO Bjørn Tore Larsen said the company was aggressively chasing efficiency via heavy tech investment that delivered “very quick payback, both cutting overhead costs and driving new revenue”. In early May this year, the airline announced it would slash 35% of its administrative staff, with new CEO Eivind Roald announcing weeks later that the company was actively exploring options for a full sale or merger.

Erie Meyer, senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy and former chief technologist at both the FTC and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calls the pattern of complaints against Norse “particularly egregious”. “These customers are not just vulnerable to scammers — they are practically handed straight to them on a silver platter,” she says, noting that passengers facing similar issues should file formal complaints with their state attorney general, who is far more likely to investigate individual cases and support impacted consumers. (The FTC declined to comment on specific companies or ongoing investigations.)

As for my own canceled Rome trip: I eventually received my full refund, but not via the airline’s AI bot or broken refund portal. The same day I submitted my public records request to the FTC, I emailed Bård Nordhagen, Norse’s chief customer and communications officer, directly, noting I was reaching out as a frustrated customer rather than a journalist. That workaround is unlikely to be accessible to the average passenger, but within an hour I received confirmation that my refund was being processed, and the full $940 landed in my bank account two days later.