Corporations have also been known to leak information to build excitement and encourage word of mouth before the official announcement. The story was likely under an embargo and leaked early.
And I stand by this being deceptive advertising for free publicity and information harvesting. Do you have any idea exactly what goes into a promotion of this proportion? No major corporation plans a promotions like this without months of preparation and planning. No corporation worth it's salt would plan something like this half-a**ed and then pull it at the last moment. There would be heads rolling for a failure of this magnitude.
Blaming this on a 'poor bottom run social media person' is an excuse. The failure is with Corporate Communications and the PR department who should have issued public explanation/apology on their main Twitter account. The Media Relations team is atrocious. Why hasn't their crisis management PR team jumped in on this...because this is more than people not winning free cruises, this is a hit to Royal Caribbean's integrity, reputation, and trust that the general public had (past tense) in them. When a company says what they're going to do...they need to do what they said they'll do...or explain exactly why they didn't.
P.S. Don't gaslight me. It WAS announced on Twitter. The tweet was deleted. I have the link...which is dead, and it's entirely possible a Twitter management tool such as CircleBoom was used to delete the history, otherwise I'd post a screenshot of the tweet for your reading pleasure. Here's the dead link for you. https://twitter.com/RoyalCaribbean/status/1461514304650297348?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
