Give me your view: is this misundstanding the Mayor of New Orleans fault?

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In a press conference the Mayor of New Orleans jokingly said that people could evacuate to the French Quarter and ask for the "Mayor Nagin special rate" at hotels. Across the board there is no "Mayor Nagin rate" as you may suspect http://blog.nola.com/news_impact/2008/09/0913RayNaginRate.pdf http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/hotel_seekers_ask_for_nagin_sp.html In fact, it is against federal anti-trust laws for hotels to collectively agree upon rates. This follows a joke by Rudy Giuliani few weeks ago stating that people should evacuate to New York to see "The Producers" on Broadway. Apparently, some people didn't get the joke and are upset. A lot of these folks also just showed up and expected to get a "low rate" without even calling first. Who is to blame fore the misunderstanding? Locally, some hotels are giving hurricane discounts as their policy. Others already have low rate (like $89/night for hotel rooms that are normally $200+ a night) because this is the slow time for tourism and mainly what is in town right now are convention folks. I see both sides of this, but I can honestly say that for every hurricane we left for we never got a break on our hotel rooms - even for Katrina and we were in Texas then. It was a bad joke, but if you call and someone tells you "Hey, this discount doesn't exist, but here is the low rate we are offering b/c you are an evacuee" why would you be mad?