Originally Posted by sdsearch

Not necessarily. Those who have actual miles with individual airline programs probably do (Delta's "chartless" redemption possibly excepted ).

But those who instead have lots of transferable points (Amex Membership Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, etc) that have oodles of not-very-familiar-to-most foreign airline partners, with perhaps several airlines in the same alliance they can transfer to (but at many of which miles will typically expire after 3 years no matter what), they might not have a good idea of where to transfer miles for a particular trip, the timing of the transfer vs the determination of availability, etc, etc.

And the OP did mention credit card points first and airline miles only second...