better to say : "So what we're seeing is a huge increase in leisure travel and consumers wanting to go back to the kind of vacation travel they were doing before the pandemic,"

I'm not an English teacher, I'm a native English speaker, so I don't know the technical terms. But to me saying "and consumers want to essentially..." changes the sentence from one main point to two separate points. Point 1 - So what we're really seeing is a huge increase in leisure travel Point 2 - consumers want to essentially return to the sort of holiday traveling they did prior to the pandemic Using "wanting" makes the sentence sound connected, like it has one main point.

In this sentence you can use 1) consumers wanting to... or 2) consumers who want to... Both forms are acceptable. Good luck!