Even when a platform pays the tax for you, you still have to file.
Paying and filing are separate obligations. Airbnb, for instance, remits the City of Austin tax on every booking, and the city still expects a return from you reporting what they paid. For platforms that pay on your behalf, you file but don't pay. For everything else, you file and pay.
Hotel occupancy tax is a tax on the guest, not the owner. It is charged on top of the nightly rate for any stay under 30 days, collected at booking, and remitted to two governments: the City of Austin at 11% and the State of Texas at 6%. The owner's job is to make sure it gets collected, to file a return in each jurisdiction on schedule, and to pay whatever the platforms did not pay already.
That last clause is where the confusion lives. Austin requires platforms to collect and remit the city tax, but the requirement only reaches platforms that have an agreement with the city, and several of the ones you might list on do not. Others handle it differently depending on how your account is set up. A single house listed on three platforms can have three different answers to who pays, and one answer to who files, which is always you.
Read down the 'who pays' column and two things decide it. First, whether the platform has an agreement with the city at all. Second, whether it is the merchant of record on your bookings. Vrbo and Booking.com sit on both sides of that line depending on your setup, which is why they appear twice.
Whatever the platform does, the city return is yours. It is due quarterly whether or not any tax is owed with it, and a quarter with no bookings needs a zero return rather than silence. A return reporting tax Airbnb already paid is still a return.
Filed with the Texas Comptroller, monthly and due on the 20th, or quarterly if your volume qualifies. The return asks for two figures, and the difference between them is the whole job.
In practice the work is bookkeeping. Each period you need, per platform, the gross receipts, the nights over thirty days, and the amount of tax the platform remitted on your behalf. Where that last figure lives varies by platform and none of them make it especially easy to find. From those figures the city return and the two lines of the state return follow directly.
The common mistakes are all omissions: not filing the city return because Airbnb paid, reporting only taxable receipts to the state and leaving total receipts blank, forgetting that a thirty-one-night stay is exempt from both. None of them is complicated, and each is easy to miss. The consequence is worth knowing: you cannot renew your license until your returns are filed and paid, zero reports included.
For the houses we manage, calculating and filing hotel occupancy tax, city and state, every period, is available as an optional service.