If by that you mean treating the "rich" differently, you are probably wrong. People form NO may have some support from relatives and neighbors. If you are tourist, you have nothing, whether you are "rich" or poor.
It's a biblical admonition to take care of the strangers, widows and orphans in your midst.
If the tourists in question were lodged and sheltered, then they were already a step ahead of those they were evacuated out ahead of.
Now, I'm not going to question this any further. It may be that these tourists had other factors requiring their evacuation. It is likely that their rooms in the hotel required for rescue and recovery purposes. In that particular case, I agree that just evicting them to fend for themselves would've been a bad idea, and unfair.
There was another group of tourists to which this had happened. They'd made private post-disaster evacuation arrangements and their buses were confiscated. They were unfortunately left to fend for themselves after having been evicted from their hotel, left without their transportation, and none of them were supplied with information or the basic necessities.
Classism would apply if there had been no pressing need to evacuate those tourists. They were already provided with shelter, toss them some food and water, and evacuate those with the most apparent need first.
Of course, we'll never have all the information here. It was nothing more than a passing mention as far as totoal coverage of the disaster goes. It is possible the mayor's motives were suspect, but not very likely. In a chaotic situation like NO, a lot of decisions are going to have to be made quickly with imperfect information.