The Hidden Cost of AI-First Customer Service: How One Airline’s Push for Efficiency Left Passengers Exposed to Scams

On March 31, a notification from low-cost long-haul carrier Norse Atlantic Airways landed in my inbox. The $940 round-trip ticket I’d booked for my upcoming trip to Rome had been canceled, the note said, and I had just 14 days to submit a request for a full refund.

At first, I stayed calm. That calm dissolved quickly when the airline’s refund request page failed to load across two separate browsers and three different devices. After multiple follow-up emails to Norse went completely unanswered, I searched for a public customer service phone number to call—only to find none listed anywhere on the site. Digging through Reddit, I found dozens of user posts detailing what many described as Norse’s notoriously messy, unresponsive customer support.

That same day, I filed a public records request with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), hoping to understand just how common this frustrating experience was for Norse passengers. In the end, I received roughly 75 detailed formal complaints from consumers who’d purchased or attempted to purchase tickets from the airline. A clear, troubling pattern emerged: the total lack of accessible human support left a gaping void that scammers were all too quick to exploit. Of the 41 complaints that included a specific dollar amount of losses, 21 claimants reported being out more than $1,000.

While Norse Atlantic Airways does employ a small team of human customer service workers, the airline has doubled down on a tech-first operating model in recent years, relying heavily on AI-powered agents to run its customer support arm.

“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.

But the experience I shared with dozens of other Norse passengers tells a different story: this approach to customer service is time-consuming, infuriating, and sometimes financially devastating.

The Future Is Now

Launched in February 2021, Norse Atlantic Airways brands itself a “modern, lean long-haul low-cost airline.” Early on, the carrier rolled out a unified customer query inbox tool from customer service tech firm Sprinklr. And according to archived versions of the airline’s website, Norse has never publicly listed a customer service phone number for passengers to call.

In January 2025, AI firm Kindly published a case study outlining how it built Norse’s first branded chatbot, alternately called Odin or “Odin’s Wingman.” The blog post noted that Norse even went so far as to remove its public customer support email from its help page to push Odin as the “primary support channel” for all passengers.

By January 2026, Norse had retired Odin and replaced it with its current AI agent, Freya, built by AI firm Delight.ai. Delight.ai reported that the airline’s rate of inquiry resolutions that required no human input jumped “from 60 percent to 80 percent” just two weeks after Freya launched.

“We see the future of our customer support team as AI agent managers,” Norse Chief Product Officer Alf Lim wrote in a Delight.ai blog post. Lim added that Freya is a “core part of the team” at Norse. The framework, per the post, lets Norse upskill existing customer support staff into these AI manager roles, which are described as “specialists who continuously optimize, train and step in when human-touch is required.”

Nordhagen confirmed to WIRED that Freya has been a success for the company, and now handles 99 percent of all incoming inquiries from passengers.

A Scammer’s Paradise

Many of the FTC complaints shared one devastating common thread: when passengers needed to change a flight, adjust a booking, or request a refund, they turned to Google to find Norse Atlantic’s customer service phone number. Eighteen of the complaints explicitly state that passengers were scammed after clicking on scam websites and calling fake customer service numbers that ranked high in Google’s search results.

In some cases, scammers told callers they still owed money for a flight the passenger thought they had already paid for in full. In others, scammers demanded exorbitant fees to make simple itinerary changes. Passengers shared their credit card details, and in some cases even their Social Security numbers, only to see massive fraudulent charges hit their statements shortly after.

One March 2025 complaint came from an elderly couple who tried to book tickets over the phone. The scammer on the line claimed their payments wouldn’t process, so they shared details for three separate credit cards. “Stupidly gave him my date of birth and last 4 of my [social security number],” the complainant wrote. By the time they realized they’d been scammed and canceled their cards, a mysterious $1,258.88 charge had already gone through. “We are 72 and 79 years old [we] are scared,” they wrote. “Please help.”

This problem has become so pervasive that Norse’s official website now displays a prominent warning about widespread online scams targeting its passengers. As of this writing, a Google search for “Norse Atlantic airways phone number” pulls up three Yelp pages that list two different phone numbers for the airline—both of which appear to be fraudulent.

When WIRED called the first number, a man answered claiming to work for Star Alliance, the global airline network that counts 26 carriers as members. But Norse is not listed as a Star Alliance member on the network’s official site, and the number isn’t listed in Star Alliance’s public directories. A Star Alliance representative later confirmed the number is not affiliated with the company, and that Norse is not a member.

When we called the second number, a different man answered saying he worked for “Flight Travel Portal,” a third-party booking service that has no public presence online. When asked about online reports that the number was a scam, he was unbothered, noting that anyone can post anything online.

Several complaints noted that when passengers reached out to their credit card issuers or the third-party travel sites they’d used to book, they were simply referred back to Norse, or told the third party couldn’t do anything to help. In August 2024, a New York passenger wrote that they’d purchased a $397 one-way flight from Paris to New York through Priceline, with cancellation insurance through Xcover and monthly payments through Affirm. When they realized they couldn’t make the trip, they contacted Priceline, which directed them to resolve the issue directly with Norse. After searching Google for Norse’s phone number, they ended up sharing their credit card details with scammers, forcing them to lock their card to prevent further fraud.

“The flight is scheduled for tomorrow, and despite reaching out to Norse Airways three days ago via email, I have received no response,” they wrote at the time. They’d contacted Priceline, Xcover, and Affirm, but none were able to intervene. “I am concerned that without any intervention, it may appear that I missed the flight, making it even harder to obtain a refund.”

Neither Xcover nor Priceline responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. An Affirm representative said the company does not comment on individual customer cases and noted that refunds are subject to individual merchant policies.

Even passengers who avoided scammers still ended up out of pocket. One Los Angeles-based passenger said they were denied boarding for their Norse flight from Rome back to Los Angeles. “At the airport in Italy, no Norse Atlantic staff were present, only contracted employees without contact information for the airline,” their complaint read. “The only other communication channel available was Norse’s chatbot; the airline has no live customer service or phone line.” Left with no options, they were forced to book expensive last-minute alternative tickets to avoid being stranded abroad with a child.

A Human Touch

On a 2024 earnings call, Norse’s then-CEO Bjørn Tore Larsen said the company is “always chasing ways where we can become more efficient, and that includes quite heavy investment in technology,” adding that these investments “give a very quick payback, both in terms of reducing cost and in terms of revenues.” In early May of this year, Norse announced it would cut 35 percent of its administrative staff. Two weeks later, current CEO Eivind Roald said in an earnings call that the airline is exploring potential sale or merger opportunities.

Erie Meyer, a senior fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy and former chief technologist at both the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told WIRED that the FTC complaints against Norse’s customer service model are “particularly egregious.”

“Customers are not just vulnerable to scammers, but served up on a silver platter to the scammers,” she said.

Meyer recommends that affected passengers file claims with their state attorney general’s office, which is more likely to investigate individual claims, respond to consumers, and identify broader patterns of harm. The FTC declined to comment on specific companies or practices when contacted by WIRED.

As for me, I eventually got my refund the old-fashioned way: by talking to a human. The same day I submitted my public records request to the FTC, I emailed Bård Nordhagen, Norse’s chief customer and communications officer, directly. (While I made clear I was reaching out as a customer first, not as a journalist, this workaround is not accessible to most passengers.) Within an hour, I received a confirmation that my refund was being processed. The money hit my bank account just two days later.