Genie Blu is 45m but just 380 GT, with 1,400nm of range

A 45 metre that chose not to be a big 45 metre

Genie Blu left Alia Yachts at Antalya on 1 August 2026 and is running for Italy, two months after she was launched in June. She is 45 metres long on a beam of 8.89 metres, and her draft is 2.33 metres. Boat International and SuperYacht Times both record her at 380 gross tons, and that figure is the one worth stopping on. Volume is what most owners buy when they buy length, and 380 GT is a restrained number for a boat of this size.

The rest of the specification follows from it. She sleeps ten guests in five cabins and carries seven crew, hull and superstructure are both aluminium, and the hull form is semi-displacement rather than the full displacement a 45 metre of this weight class would usually use. She flies the Maltese flag. Naval architecture is by Lateral Naval Architects in the United Kingdom, while Luca Dini Design and Architecture drew the interior and worked with Alia's in-house team on the exterior. The owner is the Italian entrepreneur Gianluca Vacchi, and the name carries over from his earlier Wally sailing yacht Genie of the Lamp, with the second word taken from his daughter's name.

What Luca Dini took out

The design brief is unusually explicit, and the designer has stated it plainly. "The project is based on subtraction rather than addition," Luca Dini said of the boat. "We removed barriers, reduced unnecessary volume and opened the yacht wherever possible." What that means in practice is a single-level deckhouse that occupies far less of the length than a 45 metre normally gives it, floor-to-ceiling glazing along the main saloon, and drop-down side wings that open the main deck to the water when she is at anchor.

The aft end is arranged as a cascade of steps running down from a raised cockpit to the swim platform, so the transition from the seating area to the sea happens over several shallow levels instead of one drop. Forward there is a lounge and an open foredeck rather than the tender and crane arrangement that usually fills that space. Gokhan Celik, Alia Yachts' president, set out the same thinking from the yard's side. "Rather than maximising interior volume for its own sake, this project is about purity, proportion and the owner's experience of the sea," he said. An owner reading this should understand what is being described: interior square metres were spent on openness and glass, and the gross tonnage is the receipt.

The numbers Alia has not published

She is powered by four Volvo Penta diesel engines and her top speed is recorded at 23 knots, which is quick for 45 metres and is what the light aluminium structure and the semi-displacement hull are for. Beyond that the published record thins out quickly. The yard has not released the engine model or the output per unit, and the only horsepower figure available anywhere is a single database entry that no second source corroborates, so this desk will not print it. There is no independent sea trial of Genie Blu, and every performance figure in circulation traces back to the builder.

The databases do not entirely agree with each other either. Boat International and SuperYacht Times both list 380 GT; YachtBuyer lists 370. That gap is small and it does not change the character of the boat, but it is the kind of discrepancy a buyer should resolve from the tonnage certificate rather than from a listing. The range figure of 1,400 nautical miles is given at cruising speed, and the cruising speed itself is not stated, which makes the number difficult to plan against. None of this is unusual for a yacht delivered three days ago. It is worth writing down because the absence of independent data is itself a fact about the boat at this moment.

1,400 miles is a Mediterranean number

Range is where the trade-off becomes concrete. At 1,400 nautical miles Genie Blu is provisioned for the sea she was built for: the western and central Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Turkish coast, where a fuel dock is rarely more than a day away and the cruising pattern is short hops between anchorages. That is the pattern most 45 metre yachts actually follow, and building for it rather than for an ocean is a defensible decision. It is also a decision that closes doors.

An Atlantic crossing is not a casual undertaking on this boat. The direct route from the Canaries to the Caribbean runs well beyond 2,500 miles, so a winter in the West Indies means either a long-range fuel plan, a yacht transport ship, or simply not going. Four engines rather than two also means four sets of servicing, four fuel systems and more scheduled maintenance than a twin-engine installation of the same total output, and on a boat with seven crew that work has to be planned around the owner's use. A buyer who wants the Caribbean or the Pacific in the schedule should look at a displacement hull instead, and should not expect this one to be argued into the role.

Alia's record, and the resale question

Alia Yachts is a full-custom builder at Antalya rather than a series yard, and its delivered fleet is the evidence a buyer should weigh: Al Waab, Samurai, Ruya, Atlantico, Limerence, Ximena, San, Virgin del Mar VI and the support vessel Phi Phantom. That is a real record in aluminium and it is why a boat shaped this far from the standard 45 metre layout was buildable at all. A series builder prices deviation from its own tooling; a custom yard of this kind starts from the drawing. The involvement of Lateral on the naval architecture and Luca Dini on the design says the same thing about how the project was resourced.

The counterweight is the secondhand market. Alia builds a small number of boats a year, so a future seller has few directly comparable transactions to point a broker at, and a thin comparables set tends to mean a longer time to sell and more negotiation on price than a Feadship or a Benetti of equivalent age. Aluminium is lighter and faster and it is what makes this boat work, but it is more expensive to repair after a hard berthing than steel or composite, and it requires the bonding and anode regime to be kept up properly. No price has been disclosed for Genie Blu and she is not for sale. An owner considering a similar commission should price the survey, the tonnage certificate and a sea trial into the deal, because on a boat this new those are the only independent numbers he is going to get.