This is good advice if you're only planning on doing a few hard to get ADRs and are flexible enough to wait to do them until the end of your stay.
But what if you're on a DxDP type of trip where you're planning on a lot of hard to get reservations throughout your trip?
To complicate things even more, imagine you're planning a split stay trip with DxDP style dining where you're planning to spend the first 4 nights at a MK resort and the next 4 nights at an EP resort. To minimize travel, you'd like to have all of your MK area ADRs in the first half of your trip and all of your EP area ADRs on the second half of your trip. Disney will only let you make ADRs for each leg of the trip when you hit the 180 mark for each resort. Under this scenario, you might be locked out of some popular ADRs for both legs of the trip (especially during a
free dining period).
One solution would posibly be to intially book the first leg of your trip to extend over the entire trip for the sake of making ADRs, then once you've made them, cancel/shorten the first reservation and then add the second reservation. But then you run the risk of not getting your desired resort (or room type) for the second leg (for example, certain resorts are sometimes completely booked six months out). And you still might not get all of your ADRs for the first leg.
Of course, you can always resign yourself to the fact that you might just not get all of your desired ADRs at your 180 day mark(s). But I personally hate having to check the site every day hoping for cancellations. Too stressful and time consuming.
I can think of a couple of ways to possibly get around this problem but they're somewhat complicated and I'm not 100% certain they will work (that being said, I do think they potentially save more time and stress than continually having to watch for cancellations, they just require more upfront expense and planning).
