A new equation of state for a hot and dense hadron gas (HG) is obtained where the finite hard-core size of baryons has been incorporated into a thermodynamically consistent formulation of excluded volume correction. Our model differs from other existing approaches on the following points. We assign a hard-core volume only to each baryon and mesons, which, although they possess a small volume, can fuse and interpenetrate into one another. Use of the full quantum statistics is made to obtain the grand canonical partition function, where excluded-volume correction has been incorporated by explicitly integrating over volume. We thus find that the new model works even for cases of extreme temperatures and/or densities where most other approaches fail. The numerical calculation indicates that the causality is respected by our prescription even at extreme densities. The temperature and density dependences of various thermodynamical quantities, e.g., pressure, baryon density, entropy and energy density, compare well with the results of other microscopic HG models. After suitable parametrization of the center-of-mass energy in terms of temperature and baryon chemical potential, we explore some new freeze-out criteria which exhibit full independence of the collision energy and of the structures of the colliding nuclei. We further demonstrate the suitability of our model for explaining the various experimental results of the multiplicity ratios of various particles and their antiparticles. Finally, we use our excluded-volume model to obtain the transport behavior of a hot and/or dense HG, such as shear viscosity- to-entropy ratio and speed of sound, and compare the results with earlier calculations.