All this surcharge stuff, the nickel and diming that is rampant in Australia at the moment is actually based upon classic sales psychology. The idea basically goes that you get your customer to mentally make the buy decision before you actually tell him the full price. Its a human condition and easily played.
There is no reason for surcharges in any industry I can think of; lets take a great example of this though, only corrected in recent years but the legacy still remains on invoices, the car hire game: As the hiring customer, I don't give a stuff about admin recovery, insurance recovery, registration recovery, and so on and so forth. In the same way I wouldn't care about tyre, servicing, depreciation, company tax, employee wages or whatever recovery fees. Honestly, I don't want to know what makes your business tick or the costs involved, you don't have to show me your business plan to justify your costing model - just tell me the full price of your goods or services...
But this is the thing isn't it? Free car hire folks, all you have to do is pay for our costs as "recovery" and we'll add a non negotiable return on investment to the shareholders too, but the car hire, that bit is free mate
So, no, none of these companies want you to switch back to cash. Hotels certianly don't. They will start being robbed by armed groups, need Armourguard trucks to move cash about, etc. This is not the plan or the intent of the CC surcharge. What they want is to reap an extra 1.5-2% or whatever on top of the advertised fee when you have mentally already decided to purchase their product based upon their advertised cash price.
If they (the combined total of merchants doing this) really wanted you to use cash they'd increase all their pricing by 2% and offer a 2% discount to customers who wished to pay by cash. It would get around the anger of the general CC users and offer a genuine incentive to move their clientele back to cash money.
Believe me, if they could get away with it legally, they'd surcharge -all- forms of payment. CC, EFT, Cash, everything.
This is a truth in advertising issue in my mind and not an RBA issue. The ACCC should make a serious stand and shock merchants back into some truth.