Norse Atlantic Airways Offers Dirt-Cheap Tickets. There’s a Catch
On 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 …

