Edit: there are also 2 other sibling comments that are about the same topic and left behind.

edit: According to the Austrian National Bank the number of issued credit cards in Austria was 2,85 mio. in 2012, compared to 8,5 mio. debit cards (population: 8.747 million (2016)), and the amount of credit cards was growing rapidly. Seems like there are more people with credit cards than I thought.

https://www.oenb.at/en/Payment-Processing/Card-Payments/Card...

edit2: Statistics Austria has the percentage of households with credit cards at 53% in 2014

http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gese... (German, it's the bottom row)

The real problem here has nothing to do with credit cards though, but with the unavailability of Visa/Mastercards debit cards in many European countries. For example, in my home country, Romania, very few people have credit cards, possibly even less than in Austria (edit: after your edit, definitely less), but everybody has a Visa/Mastecard debit card. No such thing in Austria. I heard that even in Germany it's hard to get a Visa/Mastercard debit card.

People don't want credit cards for various reasons, that's fine, although personally I don't agree with their reasoning, but Visa/Mastercard should still be available as a platform rather than being restricted to credit cards.

The advantage of that over an actual credit card is security and cost control: I have a separate bank account only for my Visa debit card. This account has overdraft disabled and will bounce payments instead at no cost to me. I keep a balance close to zero on this account. When I want to pay something online, I quickly do a transfer in that amount from my main account to my "Visa account", then pay. This will immediately subtract funds from my account, or the payment will immediately fail if there isn't enough (but there will be as I just transferred it).

This means my card is fraud-proof except in the unlikely case of someone managing to make a payment during the couple of seconds between me pressing transfer in my bank app and pressing pay wherever I'm paying. And even if they did that, they'd be limited to the amount of my intended purchase.

Apart from that very low worldwide acceptance, and even when it's accepted in theory, it rarely works in practice in countries not accustomed to them. For example when I go to the US I often see the Maestro logo on various retail shops or PoS machine, but I have never been able to successfully make a transaction, ever. In fact, even ATMs are sometimes hit and miss, though those usually work.

Oh yeah, and they are in general unusable with hotels and car rentals, even in Europe.

It's the same with Amex in Europe. Almost all big supermarkets (Spar, Merkur, etc) display Amex sign on their entrance, but I have never met an employee that knew what to do with Amex cards. At least Amex cards, unlike Maestro cards, have, or can have good benefits like airline miles and whatever. You get nothing with Maestro.

Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.

Because credit cards provide a valuable service that other cards don't and I see everyone around me using them because of it, either directly or through a virtual credit card service. The biggest advantages are wide acceptance throughout the world and the ability to arbitrate disputes.

>Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.

This is usually against the merchant rules and I've never seen anyone do it.

Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of that.

There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.

That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.

I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.

This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.

Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.