Air Canada flights from Auckland to Washington, D.C. Dulles Intl Airport (AKL - IAD)

Everything except plane been not ready to fly and fixing took 2 hours

We were in business class and had to go and find someone to get a drink a couple of times during the flight. Meanwhile, the lady in front of me slept for the first part of the flight and had her dinner later (making a lot of noise) and the steward treated her like royalty. Deplaning was also extremely odd as they spent 15 minutes letting all people off first that had to catch other flights. We were only 15 minutes late. I’ve almost never had to do that before, and only when we were extremely late. Almost seemed like this crew was new and/or inexperienced. Im sure they are going to blame Covid!

I think given the circumstances the crew and staff were put in they did a great job. You cannot really hold them at fault for... A) Cancelling your flight 3 hours before departure. B) Automatically emailed about being re-booked on another flight the following day, no compensation offered at all. C) Finding out at your re-booked flight that the live cargo (flying w/ dog) that I had to spend 2.5 hours on the phone confirming kennel dimensions weeks before my original flight was not also automatically re-booked. D) Getting re-re-booked on a new flight that could take and/or had room for live cargo. For all of this, Air Canada offered ZERO compensation - nothing for the pet-friendly hotel room I had to get because my flight was canceled 3 hours before it was due to leave, nothing for pet or bag fees, not even complimentary in-flight food & beverage. I understand that things happen, stuff comes up that for valid reasons requires flight cancellations and that covering the costs of every inconvenienced customer is not feasible. I get that. But I have to think that there must be some middle ground between that and absolutely nothing, which seems to be the current approach.