Ouch. If you have to announce your fee requirements in the first sentence of a conversation with people who aren't even hiring you, you're probably very insecure. Sounds like a horrid speaker.

More broadly, though, I think the bigger problem isn't that the organizer didn't exercise enough control (although it does seem as though some of the problems might have been avoided with better speaker guidelines), but that he made an excuse rather than just outright apologizing. 

Look on the bright side: you know where not to go for advice or business strategy.