“HAVE you seen the toilet?” said the man next to me. “You have to see the toilet.”

Airplane bathrooms are hardly conversation starters, and if they are, it’s generally not a conversation one wants to continue. But I had just boarded the Dreamliner — Boeing’s new 787 that is outshining its ancestors with roomier overhead bins, larger windows, power for smartphones, a quieter cabin, more humid air and, as it turns out, a toilet that’s a crowd pleaser.

A vision in white, it has plastic tabs on the sides of the lid and the seat so you barely have to touch them, a sensor instead of a flush button and, according to some users, a more subdued whoosh when flushed. “It’s very refined,” said my seatmate, Joe Nevin, a former executive at Apple turned Aspen ski pro. “It doesn’t sound like it’s going to take your clothes off.”

Mr. Nevin was among some 200 hard-core frequent fliers on board United Airlines Flight 1807, the first North American charter of the Dreamliner. And over the course of a few days in November, they — and I — would flit from San Francisco to Houston to Chicago, all the while racking up miles and exploring the plane from nose to tail.