Several phase transitions for excited random walks on the integers are known to be characterized by a certain drift parameter . For recurrence/transience the critical threshold is , for ballisticity it is and for diffusivity . In this paper we establish a phase transition at . We show that the  expected return time of the walker to the starting point, conditioned on return, is finite iff .  This result follows from an explicit description of the tail behaviour of the return time as a function of , which is achieved by diffusion approximation of related branching processes by squared Bessel processes.