This is great advice, thank you so much. I have been playing around with different things all day. I am not sure if I want to go with costco for the character breakfast or getawaytoday.com for the early entry. I wish one of them offered both. Also when you say getawaytoday.com offers the usualy WDTC perks, what is that?? Sorry for the questions but I am a usual book through the Disney website type myself. Thanks.
People who book through Disney direct, aka WDTC, get a certain kind of lanyard, a pin (or rather you get a voucher for the lanyard and pin), you get various discounts, usually some sort of preferred seating for some shows...
With AAA and Costco it's the same, but your vouchers show the company you booked with, and so the lanyard we got says Costco Travel on it and is a powder blue, while the AAA-users we saw at the parks had bright RED lanyards with AAA printed on them. The pins were likely the same, a castle in the clouds (DH traded his with the CM immediately, lol).
I'm having a hard time remembering with the WDTC lanyards looked like.
When I was booking, Costco was offering the character b'fast (though to be clear, with MY package at the time that I booked, my package cost approximately $1 less than it would have to go through AAA and pay for a character b'fast for the three of us...for us it was for the convenience of having a voucher for it, rather than a savings) and a $20 gift card. We got Mickey's ToonTown Morning Madness vouchers, and preferred seating vouchers for Aladdin, Muppets 3-D, the bug's land 3-D show, and something else. Also a Downtown Disney discount card.
When I was booking, AAA offered basically the same thing, but instead of the preferred seating for Aladdin, etc, they offered a special seating for Turtle Talk, and something else I don't recall. Same MTTMM vouchers, same DTD discount vouchers.
Just figure out when you want to go, take notes, and if you see a good price BOOK IT. I made the mistake of not booking one MORNING, and when I checked and re-re-checked with DH to make sure we wanted to do that package, I went back in in late afternoon, and ALL the prices, across the board, had raised significantly.
Disneyland.com, aaa, costco, all of 'em had raised their prices. Lesson learned!
Would it be in your best interest to use a AAA agent in the Anaheim area or use a local AAA agent in your hometown. I live in MA, we have knowledgable WDW reps not so sure about DLR.
I would have just booked the AAA trip online. But if I needed to talk to someone I would have gone in to my local office (the same folks who give me scads of "free" maps and triptiks and such, lol).
It looks like when booking through getawaytoday.com, you don't get the $150 GC.
Is the price difference worth that, though? That's the thing...they are all similar, but just different enough that you have to be very careful when comparing and contrasting.
And unfortunately, things like "are 2 EE days worth it" is soooo personal to the person wondering it. To me, EE is wonderful, but we gave EE up for a year for the savings of an Annual Passport (unless we stay onsite and get EE through the hotel). So, to me right now, two days of EE are not worth $150, BUT if the cost of the package is that much less than others, even if it doesn't come with the gift card, it might be worth it to use getawaytoday.
I bought a pack of 3 ring binders at Costco while planning our first trip, and had pages and pages of notes to figure out what each place was offering. It's not easy! But then you'll have your terrific trip, know more about what is worth what to you, and future trips will be easier.
Especially if you do what we did, and what jadedarkstar has done, and just got APs with plans to book directly with hotels. No perks, but after the first trip, many people don't find they need those perks.
). 
