Do Standard Awards make any sense?
 

If saver awards are all waitlisted, does booking a standard award for almost 2x the cost of a saver make sense?

That depends on you, really.

How much do you value the miles (include here the miles you would have accrued on a paid fare), relative to the cost of the ticket in cash? (Common valuations for KF miles are 2-2.2 cents per mile.)

How flexible are you with regard to the flights? Are you willing to fly at another (potentially very different) time and date when Saver awards are available? Are you willing to possibly not be able to fly at all? Are your miles expiring?

Depending on your answers to these, and possibly other, questions, then it may or may not be worth booking the Standard award.

I've redeemed standard F awards a few times. When I need to travel on a specific day or don't really want to find a connection from SFO/IAH which have better availability than to JFK. They're almost always available now that there are no more Full awards. Also I think you can get a free stopover on a standard award vs paying $100. With the ease of acquiring points transferable to SQ in the US these days, it definitely is an option. I'd prefer not to but it's not too bad of a redemption for SIN-US

JFK-FRA route has no saver awards. They are all gone or waitlist. I could opt for the 130k standard - 15% discount but am just debating if I should just book a J award instead for 80k since it's a fairly short route to begin with and SQ J is nothing to sneeze at.

Depends on how keen you are to fly Suites.

For me it would be clear, I would go for J.

J awards on JFK-FRA route are mostly waitlisted as well. I waitlisted a suite, a business, and then booked the business standard. Cross my fingers that either of the other 2 clear waitlist.

Sometimes you have no choice but need to book standard, for example, when you want to book 3x suite class, almost certainly one will be standard.

When the awards first came out for Suites Class, there were NO saver awards. So a simple roundtrip from Singapore to London would cost as you see in the Standard awards of around 420,000 miles + fuel surcharges ! So it depends on your urgency.. and how many points you want to redeem.

It also depends how you fly when paying for your tickets. If you usually pay full F then even standard awards are a great deal (vs paying $10-17,000). But if you only fly F on awards & usually buy best J fares or Y, then a standard award is a waste