The Blackstone Group agreed to acquire MeriStar Hospitality Corporation for about $2.6 billion, the buyout firm’s fifth hotel takeover in the past year.

Blackstone will pay $10.45 a share for Bethesda, Md.-based MeriStar, the companies said yesterday in a statement. That’s 5.2% more than its closing price on February 17. MeriStar owns 57 hotels including the Doral Desert Princess Resort in Palm Springs, Calif., and the Hilton Washington Embassy Row.

Blackstone will also assume $1.6 billion in debt, according to a MeriStar spokesman, Jerry Daly.

The buyout firm spent more than $3.7 billion in the past year to acquire La Quinta Corporation, Wyndham International, and the Rihga Royal Hotel in Manhattan.

Increasing travel has led to gains in hotel occupancies in America and room rates, spurring acquisitions.

“There are economies of scale you can enjoy as an owner when you have a large portfolio of assets as Blackstone has now,” an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group in Stamford, Conn., Robert LaFleur, said in a telephone interview. “At some point you may see Blackstone doing an IPO of the portfolio.”

A Blackstone spokesman, John Ford, declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Blackstone said it would buy nine Florida hotels and a golf-tennis club from MeriStar in a separate deal for $367 million. MeriStar has hotels under the Hilton, Holiday Inn, Sheraton, Ritz-Carlton, and Westin brands.

“As Blackstone started to look at some of our assets they made an offer for the whole company which we felt was very attractive,” the chief executive officer of MeriStar, Paul Whetsell, said.

Mr. Whetsell will resign once the purchase is completed, he said. Blackstone is likely to absorb MeriStar into its other hotel assets.

Blackstone, founded 20 years ago by Stephen Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, has $12.5 billion in commitments from investors for what would be the world’s biggest buyout fund. Since 1985 the firm has bought properties valued at $37 billion. Its real estate group is run by Jonathan Gray in New York and Chad Pike in London.

Blackstone is paying a per-share premium of 6.8% for MeriStar, based on its average closing price over the past 20 days, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That compares with a 29% average premium on the 10 similar acquisitions of American hotel companies between $1 billion and $5 billion since January 1, 2004.The companies said the price is 20% more than MeriStar’s November 10 close, the day before its shares jumped 13% on reports of a possible takeover.

Blackstone is paying 3.2 times MeriStar’s revenue, compared with the average of 3.29 for similar purchases.

MeriStar’s shares rose 35 cents to $10.28 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. They had gained 36% in the past year, compared with the 24% increase by the Bloomberg Real Estate Investment Trust Hotels Index.

Blackstone’s private-equity group employs 300,000 people through portfolio companies that combined have annual revenue of about $50 billion and pretax profits of about $10 billion, Mr. Schwarzman said in an interview last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.