Accurate vessel traffic flow prediction is significant for maritime traffic guidance and control. According to the characteristics of vessel traffic flow data, a new hybrid model, named DWT–Prophet, is proposed based on the discrete wavelet decomposition and Prophet framework for the prediction of vessel traffic flow. First, vessel traffic flow was decomposed into a low-frequency component and several high-frequency components by wavelet decomposition. Second, Prophet was trained to predict the components, respectively. Finally, the prediction results of the components were reconstructed to complete the prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid DWT–Prophet outperformed the single Prophet, long short-term memory, random forest, and support vector regression (SVR). Moreover, the practicability of the new forecasting method was improved effectively.