Honeycomb cores made of phenol resin impregnated paper are widely used in sandwich structures. This paper presents experimental investigations on papers of different phenol resin volume fraction to determine tensile and compressive mechanical properties of the honeycomb cell walls. Simulations of the conducted tests were carried out to calibrate a cell wall material model. Finally, impacts of different energy levels on honeycomb sandwich plates were simulated using a meso-mechanical approach where the honeycomb cell walls are modeled by 2D-shell elements. The obtained simulation results agree very well with the experiments.