Help me: Should we accept credit cards for our tours?

It’s about 2am. I’m in Vienna, still spinning after an exciting day in Bratislava but also burdened with office work. (Wi-fi in the room is both good and bad.) I could use some advice. Here’s the situation. With our tour program I’ve done my best to be idealistic and think creatively of ways to keep things as affordable as possible. For example, when I learned how huge the commission was for travel insurance and how tour companies and travel agencies made it standard operating procedure to cover their exposure by recommending it for interruption and cancellation losses, I decided it was disingenuous to recommend it. We would “self-insure” and include a similar coverage in our tour price without injecting the extra cost of the insurance companies. This provided a service (taking away the stress of losing money if you needed to cancel) at a far smaller cost than out-sourcing it the conventional way. In the spirit of “keeping it in the family” rather than bringing in a needless middle man which would jack up the costs of travel that we have included it. I’ve also long believed that it was a kind of tough love to not build in the roughly $10 a day cost to accept credit cards in order to be able to keep our tours more affordable. It seemed a shame to give a bank $200 so a tour member could have the convenience of using their credit card rather than writing a check to take a 20 day tour. We’ve long accepted credit cards for individual retail purchases and for deposits on tours. But for such a big ticket item, the tour balance, it seemed careless to invite the banks into the already tight equation. But we have a debate among our staff about the wisdom of this and perhaps I’m thinking too small. It’s just a basic business truth: anyone accepting credit cards is passing that fee along to their customers. The credit card companies have managed to make it illegal for companies like ours to accept credit cards for an extra fee to cover their fee but I understand we can discount our tours to those who pay cash. But if we do that, we still need to advertise our tours for the full needlessly bloated cost. (I don’t entertain frequent flier miles concerns in this debate because I don’t believe in that marketing ploy — but that’s a different discussion.) In this day and age, people expect to pay by credit card. What would you prefer? A company that kept the cost down a bit (as explained above) but required you to mail in a check or the convenience to simply go to the web site, give your credit card, and be on board. Why? Thanks for your help.