For the first time, leisure-travel air sales top pre-pandemic levels: Travel Weekly

The leisure travel sellers have broken the dam.

For the week ending April 24, leisure-focused U.S. travel agencies sold more airline tickets than they did the previous week.

Leisure sellers have achieved that milestone ahead of their corporate-travel andOTA counterparts. For the week ending April 24th, the air ticket transaction count for the OTAs was behind the year before.

• Related: Latest ARC data shows encouraging trend for leisure agencies

Leisure agency airline ticket sales are accounting for 14.4% of all U.S.-origin travel agency ticket transactions, up from 11.7% in 2019. The share coming from corporate travel agencies is down in 2019.

The share forOTAs dropped from 44.7% to 36.8% this year.

The share held by agencies that don't classify as strictly a leisure or corporate agency has gone up from 26.7% to 44.7% this year. Randy Spoon said that most of the agencies are small.

The average round-trip ticket price for the U.S. was $526 through April 10, up 21.5% from the previous year and up 28.6% from last year.