MARS (ticket reservation system)

MARS (Japanese: マルス, Hepburn: Marusu) is the train ticket reservation system used by the Japan Railways Group (JR Group) companies and travel agencies in Japan. It was developed jointly by Hitachi Rail and the former Japanese National Railways (JNR), and was later inherited by Railway Information Systems (JR Systems), which is jointly owned by the seven JR Group companies. Staffed station ticket offices equipped with MARS terminals are known as Midori no Madoguchi (みどりの窓口; lit. 'Green Window').

Originally an acronym for Magnetic-electronic Automatic Reservation System, the name was later reinterpreted as Multi Access Reservation System, before being reverted to its original meaning.

MARS is Japan’s largest online real-time reservation network, providing year-round availability of 99.999%. While the system was originally created for ticket sales and seat reservations for trains, it has since expanded to cover a range of services, including reservations for express buses, hotels, rental cars, and ferries; sales of tickets for amusement parks and exhibitions; and fare calculations for base-fare tickets, commuter passes, and express tickets.

The system currently consists of about 10,000 terminals at JR ticket offices and travel agencies, in addition to ticket vending machines and the online systems operated by the individual JR companies. It is accessed about eight million times daily, with an average of more than 1.9 million tickets sold per day.

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