Santa Barbara Honda

Reviews

• VB

  Veronica Bernal

  2 days ago
  5.0
  On December of 2025, I walked into Honda of Santa Barbara looking for an appraisal for my 2018 Honda. I was greeted kindly and met some great sales rep. Yan and Ximena they were both utterly resourceful and had the best interest in my needs. Yan showed me around and helped with the test drives, she was great! After hours of back and forth Ximena helped us close the deal, she knew what I was looking for and did everything within her abilities to help me achieve that. Ultimately, I left as a very satisfied customer with my new 2026 Acura integra A-spec. They both had the best interest in helping me and work with what aligned with my budget. I’m extremely grateful for all their help.
• SD

  suzanne desjardins

  Jan 5, 2026
  5.0
  Kenny was really great. I bought my 2014 Honda in 2014 at the Santa Barbara Honda Dealer and it was the best car I ever owned. I am back and I just bought a 2023 Honda Acura and given a really good deal. Vive Santa Barbara Honda!
• JM

  jc man

  Jan 2, 2026
  1.0
  Once you buy a car here you will never get the same attention afterwards. I would by elsewhere.
• JA

  Joel Arroyo

  Dec 30, 2025
  1.0
  I’m very disappointed with my experience at Santa Barbara Honda, specifically with Sales Manager Issa Hawatmeh. I was given clear pricing and terms in advance, including an out-the-door number, and based on that information I made the drive to the dealership expecting to finalize the purchase. Once I arrived, Issa changed the numbers and the original deal was no longer honored. This felt like a bait-and-switch situation and was extremely frustrating. Changing agreed-upon numbers after a customer arrives — especially when those numbers were previously communicated — breaks trust. Transparency and integrity are critical when making a major purchase, and unfortunately, that trust was lost here. Because of this experience, I chose to take my business elsewhere and ultimately purchased from a dealership that honored their pricing exactly as promised. I hope Santa Barbara Honda takes this feedback seriously and improves how pricing commitments are handled going forward.
• DS

  Daniel S

  Dec 17, 2025
  2.0
  My wife and I came to Santa Barbara Honda a little over a month ago with the intention of purchasing a brand new Honda CR-V EX-L after I set up an appointment for a test drive. Upon entering, my wife and I were greeted by two salespeople, Ken and Jimena. As I understand, Ken was fairly new and still training, so both of them accompanied us on our test drive. They were extremely pleasant and gave us every bit of information about the car we could possibly want. We were prepared to buy it on the spot. When we got back to the dealership, we sat down with them and they gave us a quote. We did the car negotiation thing for a bit -- we had them remove all dealership add-ons, and we haggled them on the price a bit. After Ken and Jimena went back and forth with their general manager, we firmly laid out a figure that we thought was fair based on my strong credit and prices I had seen from other dealerships in the region. (For full transparency, we offered to put $8,000 down and pay roughly $475 per month over a 60-month term). We thought this was more than fair, and at no point did they tell me these numbers were unreasonable. After we gave them a firm budget, a third salesperson (Brandon, I believe) entered the picture. This is where things went south. Brandon sat down with us, and we immediately felt the vibes shift from a friendly negotiation to my wife and me feeling like we were being backed into a corner or sized up. He began calling our budget into question, asking us, "How did you come up with those numbers?" And when I would try to answer his questions with informed answers, he would continually interrupt me before I was finished speaking. He also did not address my wife at all, which she found rather irritating. I'm not sure what exactly his angle was, but it really felt like he was just trying to outsmart us or make us feel dumb. He had a very arrogant, impersonal attitude about him, and his sales tactics seemed, frankly, very sleazy. So, after sitting with Brandon for about 5-10 minutes, I kindly said we were going to leave and think about it, at which point Brandon interrupted me and said something to the effect of, "Of course, Daniel, I'm not trying to keep you here," when he clearly was. He proceeded to just talk at us, not listening, so I just stood up in the middle of the conversation, shook his hand, and said, "Thank you, but we're going to leave." But that wasn't the end of it. As we were leaving, the general manager came chasing after us with a last-ditch offer, but at that point, we were so put off by Brandon that we truly just wanted to get out of there. The offer still wasn't close enough to the numbers we had put forward, so we declined yet again. The general manager then told us to wait while he tried to get a better offer for us. So my wife and I waited, which, in hindsight, was not a good decision. The general manager came back again and gave us an offer we didn't feel comfortable accepting, so we left -- and, again, at no point did any one of the salespeople tell us that our proposed figures were unreasonable, which one would assume they would do if they truly could not accept them. In the following weeks, they continued to leave me voicemails insisting that they wanted to get the deal done and could offer us some super exclusive but notably vague offer. I had to tell several of their salespeople to stop contacting me and that I had no longer had any desire to do business with their dealership. I'm sure that Santa Barbara Honda can improve with some personnel and culture changes, but based on my and my wife's incredibly frustrating experience, I would encourage everyone reading this to shop elsewhere, especially if the car negotiation game isn't your thing. (My wife and I wound up purchasing a lightly used Tesla Model 3 with only 30k miles from Carvana, which was an incredible experience. Fantastic customer service, no hidden fees or weird sales tactics. We didn't have to put any money down, and our monthly payment is still lower than what it would've been for the new CR-V.)

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