So, I take a route when building my airports that are fairly similar to the tutorial in that I build a baggage-less trial and add it in later.
Once you have Recurring flights though, it can be 4 or 5 days before you can connect a baggage bay to a stand.
Is there a way around this? Or am I just missing something obvious?
Depending on the size of your airport, it’s not that long to build up a functioning baggage system overnight. Only the research to get the baggage bay is longer, but then you already have the basics done by 24 hours.
This is where planning comes in to action (which is one of the fun part about the game). When you have scheduled flights, recurring or not, they are scheduled with what was available at scheduling point.
I personally avoid recurring flights in the beginning until I have baggage system ready. When last plane leaves for the night I set up baggage connections, add contracts and make a new schedule for next day. Please note there is a bug making it impossible to connect (or reconnect) baggage bays to a stand due to already scheduled flights (even if the schedule is empty). The only way I found to solve this was to delete the stand and build it again. (cash out the window method).
Also, night time is busy time where I need to have all my construction guys ready to remove service road and add new stands and reconnect everything until first flight arrives. During daytime I usually dismiss most of my construction workers and focus on small changes, or use them on huge projects like new runnways with taxi connections (as long as it do not disturb the business 
) .